Unable to create threaded lstat

[APatchworkBoy]

Every now and again when performing a git push from my local machine up to my staging repo on the server, I receive a "fatal: unable to create threaded lstat" error (thrown by this line in Git: git/git)

If I wait a few minutes and try again the push goes through, so it's not catastrophic, merely an irritant.

Any ideas what needs changing server-side?

Have checked

ulimit -v

output, which responds with 'unlimited' so it's not that...

SO implies it could be a resource limit somewhere, just not entirely sure where, and that it can be dodged by using

git config core.preloadIndex false

... but I'd rather just fix the resource limit than fudge around it.

Any suggestions?

 

[APatchworkBoy]

So, I set:

git config core.preloadIndex false

...and immediately began getting bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable errors instead of the previous git error. Setting the above git config value back to true causes the original git error from OP to return.

ulimit -u

...reveals this user's soft nproc limit is at 35, and hard is unlimited.
/etc/security/limits.conf and /etc/security/limits.d/90-nproc.conf however are both set to override this and set it to a value MUCH higher (2048) - it would appear that this isn't applying, or is being overridden elsewhere (?)

 

[APatchworkBoy]

Just changed limits in limits.conf and 90-nproc.conf and rebooted server. ulimit -u still returns 35 for this user.

 

[APatchworkBoy]

Solution: disable Shell Fork Bomb Protection via WHM. Log out, log back in.
Limits are then as per limits.conf / 90-nproc.conf.

With Shell Fork Bomb Protection enabled, nproc soft limit is 35 regardless of what you set in the above conf files, as outlined at Shell Fork Bomb Protection - Version 76 Documentation - cPanel Documentation, so I've set limits manually as follows to replicate the Shell Fork Bomb Protection for all users:

*          soft    core     200000
*          soft    data     200000
*          soft    rss      200000
*          soft   nofile    100
*          soft    stack    8192
*          soft    nproc    35

...and then overridden nproc and nofile on a per-user basis.

 

[cPanelLauren]

Hi @APatchworkBoy

I'm glad to see you were able to identify the cause of your issue, thanks for posting the detailed information on how to resolve it!