cvs update "out of memory" error

[Ming Wei]

I am checking a directory via pserver remotely
and it ran into an error on my linux host which has smaller amount of
memory resource:

cvs [server aborted]: out of memory; can not reallocate 50331648 bytes

that directory contains severals tar files such as
75141120 Mar  9 16:53 ew53dataM.tar

I tried to use CVSIGNORE to ignore all *.tar file but it seems it only
does that if I am checking in a file.

My question is how I can bypass that directory as a whole or set up
some options to allocate more memory for CVS.

Thanks