Clone failure: 'abort: unexpected response from remote server: empty string'

[Matt Harbison]

On Thu, 03 May 2018 07:12:04 -0400, David Razzetti  
<David.Razzetti at viavisolutions.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Server: Win64: Mercurial Hg v4.5.3
> Client: Win64: Tortoise Hg v4.5.3

What's doing the actual serving (I assume it's not `hg serve`), and is  
there anything interesting in the server error log (or any other log) when  
this fails?  Does it work when cloning from `hg serve`?  Does adding  
--debug to the client side point to anything?

> Attempts to clone a repository from a server to client PCs fail.  An  
> example clone command and the responses look like this:
>
> hg clone --stream http://sourceserver/hg/Foo c:\Development\Foo
> streaming all changes
> 100412 files to transfer, 4.24 GB of data
> abort: unexpected response from remote server: empty string

Does `hg init c:\Development\Foo && hg pull -R c:\Development\Foo  
http://sourceserver/hg/Foo` fail too?  What if you use `pull --rev`, and  
only pulled a couple thousand commits at a time?

> Clients with existing copies of the repository (the repository has  
> existed for some time) continue to be able to pull and push to it.
> I have verified the remote repository by running hg verify locally on  
> the server and all appears to be ok:
>
> hg verify
> checking changesets
> checking manifests
> crosschecking files in changesets and manifests
> checking files
> 99485 files, 55876 changesets, 338410 total revisions
>
> I cannot find much information on the web about this issue.  I saw a  
> response suggesting that the CGI timeout on the internet server might be  
> too small, but it is set at two hours and the clone attempts fail after  
> about five minutes.
>
> How do I go about resolving this issue?
>
> David Razzetti