Re: svnadmin hangs when creating Berkeley repository on NTFS-3G partition

On Sunday 23 November 2008, Jaan Vajakas wrote:
> I have an NTFS partition mounted in Linux at /windows/D. When there is
> no directory named repos in /windows/D and I run
> cd /windows/D
> svnadmin create --fs-type bdb repos
> then svnadmin just hangs and top shows that most of the CPU is used by
> mount.ntfs-3g and some CPU is also used by svnadmin (at the time of
> writing, the TIME+ column in top shows that mount.ntfs-3g has used 50
> minutes and svnadmin has used 8 minutes CPU time).
>
> However, on a reiserfs partition on the same disk, "svnadmin create
> --fs-type bdb repos" works fine [...]

BDB requires functional file locking in order to work correctly and it is
known that different filesystems implement this to various extents, which is
why its used is dangerous over NFS. It looks like the NTFS drivers aren't up
to the task either. If you want, you could try to just create a BDB database
without SVN to further narrow down the problem. My guess is that this will
fail, too, which would then definitely point at the NTFS drivers instead of
SVN.

As a workaround, you could create the repository on a different drive and then
copy it over, but that still doesn't guarantee that accessing the repository
will work any better. BTW: in case you want to share the repository between
Linux and MS Windows, there is actually no guarantee that BDB works for that.
AFAIK, when they are using the same architecture it works, but even that is
not guaranteed. Using '--fs-type fsfs' (which is the default) should create a
repository that is sharable though, so I'd use that.

cheers

Uli

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