Lately, when committing large files with Subversion I had problems like this:

Apache’s Log was very quiet about the problem. All I could see that SVN would be deleting the uploaded file after abort (that’s what I think it was doing):

The root of the problem is however that we’re having multiple virtual servers on our hardware and are proxying and distributing request to them through nginx. And nginx had a default setting for maximal file upload sizes, which made it automatically abort all commits that exeeded that size:

We had to change the respective setting in nginx.conf, and everything was fine after:

The real problem here is though, that the stack of technologies is not able to pass forward errors. It’s the svn client that should have told me “client intented to send too large body: 59042053 bytes” and not the nginx log.