Update failing on large project (Error: no space left on device)

[Ian MacDonald]

Hi,

We have a somewhat large project (consisting of many subprojects) in CVS
that is ~800MB in size.  The tmp space on our linux CVS server is about
500MB in size.  We can 'checkout' our project with any problems, however
when we try to 'update' the working directory, the process runs very slowly
and eventually the server fails and returns the error 'no space left on
device' to the client.  Watching the server during the 'update' we can see
the tmp directory completely filling up.

We are performing the updates from the top of our project tree.  If we
perform updates for all the individual subdirectories explicitly, we don't
have the problem.  Why does the tmp directory fill up during the 'update' if
we start at the top of the tree?  Does the whole tree get copied to the
server's tmp directory?  Could there be something misconfigured on the
server?

Thanks,

-- Ian MacDonald