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

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 01:11:36PM +0000, Kuno Meyer wrote:
> 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?

Yes in principle, but the external working copy must have been tampered
with. E.g. it must not contain mixed revisions.

And non-pinned externals inside of pinned externals need to be handled
properly.

There may be more restrictions I'm not aware of right now.
Many retrictions can be determined cheaply by querying the external
working copy's database, but some may need a disk crawl.

> 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.

Please file an ENHANCEMENT issue for this. I like the idea.

Would you be willing to try working on a patch that implements
your idea, even if it's only a rough start?

Thanks!
Received on 2014-01-24 14:11:12 CET