Git Garbage Collection fails with 'git repack' timeout exception

Symptoms

Git Garbage Collection fails with the following error:

git@**.git (clone dir /teamcity/system_caches/git/git-D9DF83B4.git): Error while running garbage collection jetbrains.buildServer.vcs.VcsException: 'git repack' command failed. exception: jetbrains.buildServer.ProcessTimeoutException: Timeout exception: the process did not produce output longer than 1800 seconds; Process: git repack -a -d --max-pack-size=400m elapsed time: 30m:0s,228ms exit code: -1

Cause

TeamCity regularly executes Git Garbage Collection processes for the server-side Git mirrors. In this case, the git repack command didn't produce any output for more than 30 minutes. The server has terminated it because it's the default timeout for this command.

This most likely means that the repository in this particular Git mirror is rather big, and 30 minutes is simply not enough time for Git to finish repacking its objects.

Resolution

It is possible to increase the default timeout of this operation by adding the teamcity.git.repackIdleTimeoutSeconds=<value> internal property with a new value in seconds.

Additional information

git-repack