Nice clean code. A couple of places to start looking are probably in keeprunning(). Any file handle issues on repeated runs?

The threads in lines 245-247 feel like they could deadlock or have a race, esp if changes happen nearly simultaneously on both ends, or if a change on one end is received and sync'ed to the other. I'm not sure how git handles multiple writes? Almost wonder if forking might cure the memory leak too or at least make it easier to see (see my other comment of some shell code).