git status --> Out of memory, realloc failed

[Carsten Fuchs <carsten.fuchs@cafu.de>]

Dear Git group,

I use Git at a web hosting service, where my user account has a memory 
limit of 768 MB:

(uiserver):p7715773:~$ uname -a
Linux infongp-de15 3.14.0-ui16322-uiabi1-infong-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 
3.14.79-2~ui80+4 (2016-11-17) x86_64 GNU/Linux

(uiserver):p7715773:~$ git --version
git version 2.1.4

The problem is that `git status` fails with an out of memory error:

(uiserver):p7715773:~/cafu$ git status
fatal: Out of memory, realloc failed
fatal: recursion detected in die handler

I talked to their support and their suggestion was to set a couple of 
memory constraints and to run `git gc`. This seemed to work well – but 
`git status` still fails:

(uiserver):p7715773:~/cafu$ cat ~/.gitconfig
[color]
     ui = auto
[user]
     name = Carsten Fuchs
     email = carsten.fuchs@cafu.de
[core]
     editor = nano
     pager = less -M -FRXS
     packedgitwindowsize = 30m
     packedgitlimit = 40m
[i18n]
     commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1
[pack]
     threads = 1
     windowMemory = 10m
     packSizeLimit = 20m
     deltaCacheSize = 30m

(uiserver):p7715773:~/cafu$ git gc
Zähle Objekte: 44293, Fertig.
Komprimiere Objekte: 100% (24534/24534), Fertig.
Schreibe Objekte: 100% (44293/44293), Fertig.
Total 44293 (delta 17560), reused 41828 (delta 16708)

(uiserver):p7715773:~/cafu$ git status
fatal: Out of memory, realloc failed
fatal: recursion detected in die handler

The repository is tracking about 19000 files which together take 260 MB.
The git server version is 2.7.4.1.g5468f9e (Bitbucket)

Well, their next response was that they have no solution for me – 
except, unsurprisingly, coaxing me into a more expensive hosting package.

I've read the Git man page about `git config`, but was not able to come 
up with anything to improve the situation.

Any ideas what I could do to reduce the memory consumption of `git status`?

Best regards,
Carsten

PS: Many thanks to Philip Oakley for initial advice at git-users, to 
which I should have properly subscribed in the first place, as the 
Google Groups interface seems to lose messages (mine at least, and 
inadvertently posts them as HTML) and gmane's NNTP interface reports 
that it is unidirectional/read-only.