Large SVN checkout fails sporadically

Question

I'm currently experiencing issues during a large, full SVN repository checkout (20GB+), where the checkout process will halt randomly. The repository is composed of many small text files and a few large CSV files.

It's been difficult to narrow down the issue as the error only pops up a few hours into the checkout. From what I've seen, it's not a specific file that halts the process and verifying using svnadmin returned no errors.

Errors:

Typical Apache Error Log:

Unable to deliver content.  [500, #0] Unable to deliver content.  [500, #0] Could not write data to filter.  [500, #175002] Could not write data to filter.  [500, #175002] Provider encountered an error while streaming a REPORT response.  [500, #0] A failure occurred while driving the update report editor  [500, #730053] 

Specs:

Server: Windows Server 2003 running XAMPP v1.8.2-5, Apache v2.4, and SVN v1.8.9. It was recently updated from Apache v2.2 and SVN v1.5.3, which was experiencing similar issues.

Clients: Windows 7 running TortoiseSVN v1.8.8 x64, recently updated from v1.8.3 x64 which was experiencing similar issues. Command-line SVN v1.8.9.

I'm using the HTTP protocol to perform the checkout.

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Things I've tried:

Setting the "TimeOut" directive on Apache to a higher value (up to 30000 seconds).

Setting the "SVNAdvertiseV2Protocol" directive to off.

Setting the "SVNPathAuthz" directive to off.

Setting the "SVNCompressionLevel" directive to "0".

Answer 1

We've been running into this same problem recently. So far I think it has been related to newer subversion clients.

Apache dav_svn_module directive

SVNAllowBulkUpdates Prefer 

Seems to help. After adding that into apache conf, no issues have been found. Before that most of the large check outs failed.

I found a discussion thread which explains the problems which are related to subversion clients that are newer than version 1.8.x. See the mailing list thread.