CouchDB _bulk_docs allocating far more memory than needed?

[Shawn Chidester]

I'm attempting to post a single 150 MB document to my couchdb server.  The 
application that does the post usually has more than one document to post so it 
always uses _bulk_docs, even for one document.

According to the crash message the couchdb server (or erlang) is tring to 
allocate 4 GB or memory for this 150 MB post.

Here is the console output when I run the couchdb server in the foreground 
(with 
log level set to debug so we can see the post header):



[debug] [<0.783.0>] 'POST' /dbname/_bulk_docs {1,1} from "--manually_omitted--"
Headers: [{'Accept-Encoding',"gzip"},
          {'Accept-Language',"en-US,*"},
          {'Authorization',"Basic --manually_omitted--"},
          {'Connection',"Keep-Alive"},
          {'Content-Length',"153786246"},
          {'Content-Type',"application/json;charset=UTF-8"},
          {'Host',"--manually_omitted--"},
          {'User-Agent',"--manually_omitted--"}]
[debug] [<0.783.0>] OAuth Params: []

Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
eheap_alloc: Cannot allocate 4454408120 bytes of memory (of type "heap").
Aborted


Can anyone confirm and/or explain this behavior?

Thanks,
Shawn