I have been trying off-and-on for past few hours to do a cvs update for
pkgsrc.

/cvsroot/pkgsrc

:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot

And every time, after around 9 minutes it fails with:

 cvs [update aborted]: received broken pipe signal

I read this is caused by running out of memory or temp file space on
server.

Is that what it means?

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/