git transfer ai_generated true

fatal: index-pack failed

ID: git/index-pack-failed

Also available as: JSON · Markdown
80%Fix Rate
83%Confidence
50Evidence
2023-01-01First Seen

Version Compatibility

VersionStatusIntroducedDeprecatedNotes
2 active — — —

Root Cause

The index-pack process failed while processing received pack data during fetch/clone. Typically caused by insufficient memory for large repos, corrupted pack data from network issues, or disk space exhaustion.

generic

Workarounds

  1. 85% success Increase pack memory limits and use shallow clone 
    Set git config --global pack.windowMemory 256m and git config --global pack.threads 1 to reduce memory usage. Or use git clone --depth 1 for a shallow clone to reduce pack size.
  2. 78% success Clone via SSH instead of HTTPS to avoid transfer encoding issues 
    If using HTTPS, switch to SSH: git clone [email protected]:user/repo.git. SSH uses a different transfer protocol that can be more reliable for large repositories.

Dead Ends

Common approaches that don't work:

  1. Repeatedly retrying the clone without addressing the memory issue 85% fail

    If the failure is due to insufficient memory for indexing a large pack, retrying produces the same OOM failure each time

  2. Increasing only the HTTP buffer without addressing pack memory limits 75% fail

    http.postBuffer affects push, not fetch/clone. The index-pack process has its own memory requirements independent of HTTP buffering

Error Chain

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Frequently confused with: