SVN Out of memory – terminating application.
by Henry Weismann on Sep.15, 2012, under Web Development
I recently tried using SVN on my clients server using a cpanel SSH account. SVN would only work on the root account but it was quite annoying because using it from root would set ownership and the group of the updated files to root instead of the cpanel account. This caused issues with “disappearing” files. I could not get SVN to work for the cpanel account SSH login and kept getting the following error:
Out of memory – terminating application.
Aborted (core dumped)
The host said they can’t debug Subversion as it was not in the scope of their support. It turned out to be a server issue after all but not exactly an issue….more like a security setting. There is a setting in WHM:
Security Center->Shell Fork Bomb Protection
Description
Fork Bomb Protection will prevent users with terminal access (ssh/telnet) from using up all the resources on the server. Unchecked resource allocation can potentially lead to a server crash.
It is recommended that this protection be enabled for servers providing terminal access.
This was limiting the memory usage by jailed shell accounts. So finally it is fixed and now I am a happy SVN user.