OOM error caused by weird git behaviour

[biddisco]

For reasons unclear to he, the commit ac6315e introduced in #201 causes thousands of git processes to be created when cloning a repo (at least from a local repo mounted on $SCRATCH) and triggers an OOM kill of the stackinator process

[bcumming]

Can this be reproduced by manually typing the commands into the terminal?

This might be a lustre file system problem.