Git gc using excessive memory, unable to complete

Question

Final update and fix: The solution here turned out to be a combination of two things: using Windows Git rather than Cygwin Git as Graham Borland suggest

Answer 1

I had the same problem, tried the solutions mentioned so far without success. But my problems with git gc began after I added big image files to repo, so I created .gitattributes file and turned off delta compression for those big files:

*.tga -delta
*.psd -delta

It worked.