cvs pserver uses ALOT of memory

[Jon Bendtsen]

1) i had some trouble finding a mailing list i found to be the right 
one for my question. I picked this one because i find my question to be 
a rather technical one, and i dont see this as a question of how CVS is 
used. If not, please tell me a better list.

This is a big email, so i will divide it into sections:
First i will tell you alot more about the problem
some information about my system
Then i will tell you what i have tried to do to lower the memory usage
And finaly i will cry for help ;-P

Anyway, i have this problem that while checking out from my repository 
i get the same results.
the cvs pserver ends up using 400-500 MB of memory, which is a little 
too much since i have about 40-50 cvs users, all using cvs throughout 
the day, meaning i constantly have about 4-5 users :( which fills the 
machine :(

The stuff i checkout is a build, aka mostly binary files, but the 
largest one is only 48M, so there is a long way to 400M of used memory. 
But maybe it isnt using the memory at all, maybe it is cache?
here's the output from ps

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
jbendts  11744 13.8 45.8 474940 473604 ?     S    18:00   1:36 
/usr/bin/cvs -b /usr/bin --allow-root=/data/cvs pserver

it makes little difference what my users check out, cvs pserver still 
uses alot of memory.
the memory usage grows from 0 up towards this, but then it starts 
dropping again, as it progressed in the cvs checkout. It dropped down 
to about half of the max memory usage, and then to 0.

jbendts  11744 11.8 23.5 474940 243048 ?     D    18:00   1:37 
/usr/bin/cvs -b /usr/bin --allow-root=/data/cvs pserver

All in all the entire module to checkout uses 758M of space, but the 
biggest individual file is only 48M

During my checkouts there were more memory avaible, from 100MB to 
500MB, since others completed
their checkout.


The machine is a single P4 3066MHz with HT. It has 1G of physical 
memory, and 3G swap.
It runs debian stable, using default linux kernel 2.4.24.
The clients are mostly tortoiseCVS, but i experience the same big 
memory usage with macCVS, and with the console CVS tools from mac osX, 
which i believe are yours
"Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.10 `Halibut' (client/server)"


I started out with the default cvs in debian stable, which is 
1.11.1p1debian-8.1
then i downloaded the lastest cvs-1.11.13.tar.bz2, and compiled that. 
This made no difference at all.
Then i looked more at the manpage of the cvs, and found out that i 
couldnt find any explination for this memory usage.


So, what now? What more can i try? What tools can i use?



JonB