Performance in Subversion vs. SourceSafe

Question

We're a distributed team of 5 developers working on rather large integrations project. We currently use SourceSafe (yes I know it sucks but it has just worked until recently and we've used it forever). Our biggest problem has recently become performance. Checking in and out project just takes forever and we're finding ourselves spending a lot of time just waiting for SourceSafe (yes we've turned off anti-virus check and all the other performance boost trix - it's still slow).

We're now looking into setting up and moving all our stuff to Subversion instead. How is performance in SourceSafe over the web compared to Subversion? I guess that the history isn't that important to move (we could just go back to the VSS database if we need an old file) and the the actually moving of files to Subversion should be a problem - right?

I'd also like to have some input on tools and add-ons that are "must have" besides the actual Subversion core tools.

Answer 1

The check in of VSS is called commit in SVN. This operation is many times faster, as SVN will only transfer the changes (aka the "diff")you made to the files, while VSS will send the whole file and difference it on the server.

the check out in SVN (getting an initial workingcopy) is somewhat slow in comparsion to other systems, if you are using http(s) and have a large (>100MB) overall size of files. SVN worst case is lot of files and directories, as HTTP-transfer will be much slower than big, single files.

However, I doubt that VSS will be faster than SVN. Overall performance of SVN is faster, more robust(no database corruptions) and easier to understand than VSS.

Nice Tools are TortoiseSVN(Explorer Plugin), smartSVn(VSS-lookalike) and commandline(flexible) as Tigraine added in my comments:AnkhSVN(Visual Studio Integration) and subversive/subclipse for eclipse IDE