svn status <file> is slow under a large check-out

I'm running Subversion 1.7.4.50525 (r1295709) on Windows 7 Pro SP1.

I have a large repository, and for clean development flow I've checked
out the root locally. But because of this, when I do:
  svn status C:\mycheckout\trunk\folder1\file1.ext

it takes a very long time, around 5-6 seconds, to finish. It doesn't
matter if the given file is modified or not.

I've run Sysinternals Process Monitor and found that there are hundreds
of thousands of ReadFile operations done on \_svn\wc.db. There are no
network accesses of course, and from an analysis of the procmon results
it's clear the slowness is from these many wc.db accesses.

But why? I could not find any issue related to this in the issue
tracker nor any mention of it in the forums, mailing lists, or elsewhere
on the web.

One more point of interest. If I throw --non-recursive in there, as in:
  svn status --non-recursive C:\mycheckout\trunk\folder1\file1.ext

it comes back immediately, no delay whatsoever. Since this is a file, I
don't get why --non-recursive should make a difference, but there it is.

Has anyone seen this? Any reason I should not add this to the issue
tracker for Subversion?

Thanks!
Received on 2012-05-04 20:06:48 CEST