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Re: Speeding up workspace

From: Mark Phippard <markphip_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2009 12:04:40 -0500

On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Bert Huijben <bert_at_qqmail.nl> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Mark Phippard <markphip_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Ruslan Sivak <russ_at_vshift.com> wrote:
>>> Toby Thain wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Switch to Linux or OS X, which should be good for an immediate 10-20x
>>>> speedup.
>>>>
>>>> --Toby
>>>
>>> Do you have any benchmarks to back this up?
>>
>> This isn't really Windows-bashing. The way SVN uses the local
>> filesystem is just orders of magnitude faster on Linux and OSX. Here
>> is a recent thread:
>>
>> http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2009-01/0326.shtml
>>
>> Back when I used to work on Windows, I would sometimes fire up Linux
>> in VMWare to test some Subclipse feature in Linux. The performance of
>> Eclipse/SVN in that Linux VM blew away Windows running natively as the
>> host. The performance difference is frankly shocking.
>
> I think this is really is 'Windows bashing' unless you have explicit
> numbers to prove it isn't.

To be clear, what I meant by that is that I have no desire to
encourage people to use something other than Windows nor to see
Windows do badly here. Being completely honest, if I was given some
magic power to make SVN faster on one OS than another I'd choose
Windows in a heartbeat. I'd guess we have at least 10x more SVN users
on Windows than any other OS.

My first three years as a SVN user and developer I only worked on
Windows. I never felt SVN was particularly slow. SVN performance, in
my own usage, always seemed fine. It was only when I started testing
SVN on other platforms as part of my work that I suddenly realized,
"whoa. there is a pretty huge performance difference here."

> Just saying NTFS is slow because subversion is slow on it doesn't
> prove anything. I already showed that our abuse of the wrong APR apis
> made merging twice as slow as it should be on Windows.

The point of my message, and I think the others in this thread, is
about the performance of SVN on Windows. Not the performance of
Windows in general. I do have to admit, that near the end of my
message I did imply a general performance gap between NTFS and Linux.
The general OS benchmarks I have seen have backed that up, but I have
to admit sometimes when you see a graph and one bar is shorter than
the other you sometimes lose the "big picture" that the difference
that bar represents is not really significant.

I am glad that you have taken steps to improve SVN performance on
Windows and look for bottlenecks. I am also optimistic that the new
WC design while being much faster on all OS, will be particularly
faster on Windows. I think the current design pays much bigger
penalties on NTFS than it does on other OS and there are reasons to
believe the new design will correct that. So in theory Windows users
might see a larger relative performance gain than users on other OS.

-- 
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/
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Received on 2009-02-07 18:05:36 CET

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