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Re: Poor performance in windows. Switching back to CVS

From: B. Smith-Mannschott <benpsm_at_gmail.com>
Date: 2007-02-06 21:44:37 CET

On Feb 6, 2007, at 20:40, Joaquim Oliveira wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Our team tried svn for 4 months, but we're switching back to CVS
> due to performance problems. Our project is a huge java one: its
> structure has 10323 files and 2420 directories (117 MB).

[snip]

This sounds similar to my situation. I work on a number of Java
projects, totalling some 13'000, all told. The largest single
project has roughly 9500 files in trunk.

>
> I searched the mail list archives, but couldn't find a solution for
> this. I found something about "the NTFS file system does not
> perform well when you have a large number of small files", but we
> need to develop in Windows, so adopting Linux/Ext3 is not an
> option. I've already seen these messages:
> - http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-04/1557.shtml
> -http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-04/1695.shtml

I've noticed this slow-down as well. My work machine is a 3 GHz P4
(2GB RAM) + a virus scanner (which seems to scan everything at the
slightest provocation) running WinXP. I have noticed the
sluggishness you describe. A simple update of a large working copy
and the hard drive rattles for minutes. The mind boggles.

Mostly, I've just avoided the problem by doing as much work as
possible on other machines:

I do most of my development on a 2.6GHz Linux box (1GB RAM) thanks to
the miracle of X11. It beats the XP box by 30% (clean and rebuild in
eclipse). It's far faster for file-system intensive operations. SVN
really does like to crawl all over the disk, doesn't it?

Recently I've been moving more of my development work onto my
personal notebook: A dual core MacBook Pro. I use Parallels Desktop
(virtualization) to run Windows when necessary. I'd move to the mac
full-time only there's a problem relating to composed and decomposed
combining characters which prevents me from working with file names
containing non-ascii characters.

Another recent discovery, that I find faster for some operations is
svk, but it (1) has no gui and (2) doesn't seem to follow svn
externals, of which we make fairly heavy use in our repository.

Sorry, bit of a ramble. You're right. Svn is slow(er) on Windows
(than I'd like).

My coping strategy has been to use alternatives when possible. In my
case this works well because my target is the JVM and my primary
tools either run on the JVM (eclipse, oXygen, rational modeller) or
are widely ported (EMACS, xsltproc, xmlstar, python, ...)

// ben

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Received on Tue Feb 6 21:45:00 2007

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