dying gasps from servername unexpected

[Matthew Pressly]

I am accessing CVS on a remote server through SSH.  Both machines are 
running CVS 1.11 under SuSE Linux, 7.1.  Everything has been working fine 
for well for months with this arrangement until yesterday when I began 
getting "dying gasps from servername unexpected" messages almost every time 
I did a checkout or update of the entire project.  This error message only 
appears when I do a checkout of the entire project module or an update at 
the top level of that project.  It does not occur when I do an update from 
somewhere further down in the directory hierarchy of the project.  The 
repository contains about 30MB of data in a total of 1679 files in 176 
directories.

I also experimented with making a copy of the project module into a 
separate directory and made successive checkouts while gradually pruning 
away sections of the module in the repository until the error messages quit 
appearing.  The success or failure of a given checkout did not seem to be 
directly related to which files the repository contained, but more related 
to the total quantity of data that was being transmitted, but at this point 
it is pretty much a black box to me.

A google searched on this subject turned up several messages, but nothing 
very conclusive.

How can I go about debugging this problem?  Am I starting to run into any 
sort of limit on how big a single cvs module can be?

The error message appears at the end of the update.  Is it something that 
can be safely ignored?  Does it indicated that any of the work of doing the 
checkout or update was left incomplete, or does it just indicate some type 
of failure to close the SSH connection?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--
Matthew Pressly
mpressly@claborn.net