Re: Way to minimize number of svn files on a hardrive?

On May 7, 2007, at 6:29 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> On May 7, 2007, at 13:55, Xn Nooby wrote:
>
>> Is there a way to minimize the number of files that Subversion
>> stores on a hardrive? Our Windows XP PC's are apparently becoming
>> somewhat unstable after checking out about 100GB of small C
>> sourcecode files, the number of actual files is over a million.
>> Our Windows Admin has asked me to look in to this, in case there
>> is a simple fix. I already disabled the TortoiseSVN service, so
>> that it only colorcodes directories being browsed (we use both svn
>> cli and gui). We are basically looking for a way to cut down the
>> number of files on the hardrive.
>>
>> I had suggested moving the files to a network storage device or to
>> a directory on one of the servers, or possibly compressing (via
>> NTFS) the directories under Subversions control. I also considered
>> doing an export instead of a checkout, and then having people only
>> checkout the directrories they were working in (which is kind of
>> kludgy).
>>
>> Is there an option to maybe checkout just the working copies, and
>> then request the base copy in case you want to work on the file?
>>
>> We have several large projects, and a few people work on all of
>> them - they are the ones having issues with too many files on
>> their PC's. Sorry to be vague about "their Windows problems", I
>> have not seen them first hand. I have not heard of any of the
>> linux users having issues with too many files on their drives.
>
> There is no way to reduce the number of files in a Subversion
> working copy, other than checking out a smaller subset of the
> repository. The following feature requests may be relevant to you:
>
> Request to allow working copy with compressed text-base:
> http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=908
>
> Request to allow working copy with no text-base:
> http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=525
>
> It is possible to put your working copy on a remote server. At the
> web design company where I used to work, we did this, accessing our
> working copies from Windows machines via Samba shares stored on a
> Linux server. This works, but is considerably slower than having
> local working copies, and sometimes the TortoiseSVN badges get out
> of sync. In our case, we only did it this way so that we could test
> our web sites using the Apache, PHP and MySQL already installed on
> the Linux server, before committing changes from the working copy.
> If Windows is having trouble with your local working copies, my
> intuition would be to expect additional problems, not fewer
> problems, when moving the working copies to a server.
>
> You may be interested in SVK, which is based on Subversion and I
> believe works with normal Subversion repositories. It stores its
> local working copy data in a different format. Whether this takes
> less or more disk space or uses fewer or more files than a
> Subversion working copy I don't know. You could try it out.

There is no .svn directory in an svk working copy, so you only have
the files and directories that are checked out, so it is much smaller.

Regards,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac, Ph.D.
CTO, OrcaWare Technologies
<blair@orcaware.com>
Subversion training, consulting and support
http://www.orcaware.com/svn/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org