How do I improve Windows Subversion client update performance?

Question

How do I improve Subversion client update performance? It appears to be disk bound on the client.

Details:

• CollabNet Windows client version 1.6.2 (r37639)
• Windows XP SP2
• 3 GB RAM with PF Usage around 1 GB and System Cache of 1.1 GB.
• Disk has write caching enabled
• Update takes 7-15 minutes (when very little to update).
• Checkout has 36,083 directories/files (from svn list)
• Repository has 58,750 revisions.
• Checkout takes about 2.7 GB
• Perf monitor shows % Disk Write time stays near 90% during update.
• Max Disk Read Bytes/sec got up to 12.8M and write got up to 5.2M
• CPU, paging file usage, and network usage are all low.
• Watching the server performance seems to show that it isn't a bottleneck.

I'm especially interested in answers besides getting a faster disk (especially configuration changes).

Updates from some of the suggestions:

• I need the whole thing so sparse directories won't work.
• Another client (TortoiseSVN) takes 7 minutes also
• TortoiseSVN icon overlays have be configured so they don't cause the problem.
• Anti-virus is configured to to skip that directory is it isn't causing the problem.

Answer 1

I experience exatly the same thing. Recently replaced Perforce with svn, but if we cannot overcome the performance problems on Windows me must consider another tool. Using svn 1.6.6, Win XP and Vista clients. RedHat server. My observations matches yours:

• Huge disk-write activity.
• Antivirus not a bottleneck.
• No matter witch svn-clients are used.
• No server or network bottleneck.

Complementary info More than 3 times faster operations on:

• Linux (Ubuntu).
• Linux (Ubuntu) running on VirtualBox at Win Vista host.
• Win XP running on VMWare at RedHat host.