Any way to avoid working copy locks?

During an "svn update" or "svn commit" my understanding of SVN is that it
walks the local folder tree, placing some sort of lock file within each .svn
folder.

The operation is then executed and at the end, the locks are removed. Hence
the need for the "clean up" command if the operation crashes for some
reason. I assume this is done to ensure that you can't corrupt your working
copy by running two operations at the same time on the same working copy -
with no doubt disastrous results. Seems reasonable.

My question - is there any way to run without those local locks?

We have a really big folder tree (~5GB of data and ~100,000 files in a huge
number of folders). Currently the time spent locking and unlocking the tree
significantly dwarfs the time spent working on the tree (we normally are
only changing a tiny fraction of this data). So for automatic (non-human
controlled) tools using SVN it would be nice to disable the locking, so
updates and commits were faster. For the developers out there, think
continuous integration server. We'd be happy to take on the risk that if we
ran two commands at once we've blow up our working copy. That's pretty easy
to guarantee never happens with a single lock around the whole process.

Anything we can do to get this speed up?

Thanks,

Doug

P.S. Please include me directly in any replies. I'm not currently
subscribed to this list.
Received on 2011-03-16 07:20:13 CET