Menu
We have a rather large SVN repository. Doing SVN updates are taking longer and longer the more we add code. We added svn:externals to folders that were repeated in some projects like the FCKeditor on various websites. This helped, but not that much.
What is the best way to reduce update time and boost SVN speed?
488
The key argument is that SVN due to its support for atomic transactions needs to do many more file operations than CVS in order to ensure integrity. This makes it slower than CVS, especially if there is an on-access virus scanner involved.
Simply type svn update [name-of-directory] , or cd to that directory and type svn update there.
The SVN update Command. The svn update command lets you refresh your locally checked out repository with any changes in the repository HEAD on the server. It also tells you what has been changed, added, deleted. If a change has been made to a file you have also changed locally, svn will try to merge those changes.
If it's an older SVN repository (or even quite new, but wasn't setup optimally), it maybe using the older BDB style of repository database. http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/notes/fsfs has notes on the new one. To change from one to another isn;t too hard - dump the entire history, re-initialise it with the new svn format of file system and re-import. It may also be useful at the same time to filter the repo-dump to remove entire checkins of useless information (I, for example, have removed 20MB+ tarball files that someone had checked in).
As far as general speed goes - a quality (speedy) hard-drive and extra memory for OS-based caching would be hard to fault in terms of increasing the speed of how SVN will work.
On the client side, if you have tortoisesvn setup through PuttyAgent for SSH access to an external repository machine, you can also enable SSH compression, which can also help.
Edit: SVN v1.5 also has the fsfs-reshard.py tool which can help split a FSFS based svn repository into a number of directories - which can themselves be linked onto different drive spindles. If you have thousands of revisions, that can also help - if for no other reason than finding one file among thousands takes time (and you tell tell if thats a problem by looking at the IOwait times)
113
Disable virus checking on folders that contain working copy code. This caused my updates to become twice as fast.
36
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
