Redmine

SW Setup:
svn over apache dav
Redmine.pm authentication method
PostgreSQL database
repository and redmine and database are all on same machine
redmine from svn (rev 1354)
HW Setup:
Intel Quad Core CPU
4 Gig RAM

This setup works quite well. On a daily use the problem wouldn't show up. Normal checkouts and commits won't activate it.

However I wanted to svnsync remote repository into one managed by the described setup in order to copy it and continue working with redmine on that project. The repository has ~1200 revisions. The whole process was very slow and memory intensive. At each 30 revisions copied the server's ram was full and the svnsync program stopped working. The only thing that helped was restarting apache and running svnsync again. When restarting apache the memory usage was dropping to 200mb. And then again and again.. Memory full -> Restart apache -> Memory empty.. I've disabled the authentication (simply allowed everyone access to the svn repository without user validation) to test and voilla, everything worked fine. The process wasn't using more than 500mb of memory and the speed improvement was doubtless.