Subversion 1.7 (client): Does reindexing and vacuuming wc.db improve performance?

Question

A bit of background of environment I'm using:

• SQLite 3.7.5
• TortoiseSVN 1.7.5 (Subversion 1.7.3)

Realising Subversion 1.7 is using SQLite to store their metadata, I just did a bit of an experiment by doing reindexing and vacuuming the wc.db file that resides on the .svn directory (sqlite.exe wc.db "reindex;vacuum"). It did bring down the size of said file from 70 MB to around 30 MB.

AFAIK, the SVN cleanup doesn't do this and thus I'm assuming that it's not part of the process.

Does this help increase performance? Do I then need to do this regularly?

Answer 1

Does it increase performance? It's a standard SQLite database and vacuuming among other things can potentially "defrag" the database pages which will in turn cause faster access times.

With that said, it's likely you won't notice a huge impact. But then again, you could. I guess the short answer: It can't hurt and you could gain some performance.

See the official SQLite docs on VACUUM.