possible optimization on update at externals with fixed-revision number?

Hi all,

One of the repositories I am working with has a long list of "svn:external"
links. This has a major impact on working copy update performance, since
each external link needs an additional roundtrip to the (painfully slow) SVN
server. So it can easily be the case that the update of the main working
copy (several 10k files) is done in <10 seconds, but querying the 40-45
external repository takes another 60-80 seconds.

However, since the external links are all fixed to a specific revision
number, and since the working copy knows its current reference revision
number, why do you have to roundtrip to the SVN server anyway? Wouldn't it
be safe to omit the server roundtrip, under the assumption that a published
revision is immutable?

At least in my case, this would result in a speedup of "svn update" of
factor 5-15 in the case of no or only a only few changesets to download.

Thanks,
Kuno
Received on 2014-01-23 14:15:42 CET