Size of Subversion repository

We have been using Subversion 1.4.x for quite some time and just earlier
this year, we upgraded to 1.5.x. Our repository is still the same as we
did no dump/load between upgrades. I was curious to see what kind of
space savings we might have if we did. Our original repository is fsfs
and was created under 1.4.x as far as I remember. The format file says
3 so I might have made it with 1.3.x. The format for the new repo is 5.
Here are the numbers for two tests I did, one with fsfs and one with
bdb.

737M svn-original
690M svn-fsfs
903M svn-bdb
2.3G total

Are these numbers typical? And why is BDB so significantly larger? Is
there any real benefit to it nowadays? Our server set-up is all access
must be through the apache user via mod_dav_svn.
Received on 2011-05-05 07:18:53 CEST