svnadmin load to fsfs 9 times faster than bdb!?

I've never really been much of a user of the BDB back end. I started
with Subversion in the 1.3 time-frame and have always used FSFS.
Nevertheless, I recently was playing around with BDB and found that it
takes a *lot* longer to load from a dump file than FSFS.

* repository of 41818 revisions
* dump file (--deltas) is 2.6 GB

I'm running subversion on my (pretty ancient) home server:

* PowerPC G4 @ 1GHz (Titanium Powerbook)
* 2.5" 120GB Notebook hard drive
* 1GB RAM
* Subversion 1.6.0 (yea, I know, ancient)

I loaded the dump file into into FSFS and BDB repositories:

* FSFS took 5 hours and consumed 1.9 GB (1.8 GB after packing) of disk.
* BDB took 44 hours and consumed 2.5 GB of disk.

BDB does require far fewer "inodes", though I don't think that's
relevant on HFS+, which stores everything in one giant B-Tree. BDB
data isn't portable across architectures and BDB versions. It seems
slower. It's trickier to back up. I'm sure there are operations where
it performs faster than FSFS (svn log, for example). But, I guess I
know now why I've always preferred FSFS. Does anyone actually use the
BDB Subversion backend?

// Ben
Received on 2010-05-30 21:48:50 CEST