Why do I get occasional, inconsistent errors when checking out over http from a repository running on MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger)?

There is a bug in APR 0.9.6 that is present when it is running on Tiger, and shows up when you attempt to check out a file larger than 64Kb.

The resulting checkout fails, often with unpredictable error messages. Here are some examples of what you might see on the client side, the specific errors may differ for you:

svn: Invalid diff stream: [tgt] insn 1 starts beyond the target view position 
svn: Unexpected end of svndiff input svn: REPORT 
request failed on '/path/to/repository' 
svn: REPORT of '/path/to/repository/!svn/vcc/default': Chunk delimiter was invalid.

There may also be errors in the Apache error_log, such as:

[error] Provider encountered an error while streaming a REPORT response. 
[500, #0] 
[error] A failure occurred while driving the update report editor 
[500, #190004]

To confirm the presence of this bug - assuming you have access to the machine that the repository is being served from - try checking out using a file:// URL, which will access the filesystem directly instead of going through Apache. If the resulting checkout completes successfully, then it is almost certain that this is the problem. Currently, the best solution is to upgrade to APR 1.2.0+.