Does Subversion 1.5 performance stink?

Question

We've been working on a project where everyone is working off of trunk. The project has reached the point where our development team is growing and we've finally started doing client releases (all good things). So, to help co-ordinate all this we started following the SVN best practices of branching/merging etc.

The problem we're facing is that merges are taking upwards of 20 minutes and very often fail with "connection reset by peer" or "PROPFIND" errors. Branching and merging are just so much of a pain that they are very near unusable. We only have about 1000 files or so and very often we're merging less than 20 files and it still takes 20 minutes. We're using Apache to access SVN.

My question is, is this typical or do we have something configured wrong? How big are your SVN repositories and how long do merges take?

Edit: The server is accessed via the Internet, we have some rather large binary files, we use Mac, Linux and Windows clients. No Internet or network problems we know of.

Answer 1

This is due to Apache, see Stack Overflow question "Svnserve VS mod_dav_svn".

To recapitulate:

It seems to be less known that the choice of the server variant used - the Apache Subversion mod_dav_svn module or the standalone svnserve server - have a great impact to measured and perceived subversion performance. Usually svnserve is significantly faster than Apache mod_dav_svn ............... The most significant performance penalty was measured during svn log and svn merge operations against the mod_dav_svn server - you'll notice worse svn log performance immediately if eg. using the Eclipse Subversion plugin Subclipse.