SVN Working Copies on Network Share

Question

Ok, I'm getting my version control processes in order for my web team.

I know ideally each user would have a full working copy of their code on their local machine.

Unfortunately for a lot of our web apps they have additional server specific DB or other system integration requirements that cannot be replicated on a user's workstation (i.e. some servers just wont install on XP, vista etc.)

I'm looking at setting up an area on one of my servers that acts as a working copy for each user but still resides on the network.

i.e.

/SVRROOT/
- Dev1 Working Copy
- Dev2 Working Copy
- Dev3 Working Copy

This means that each user will have their own working space (as per SVN best practices) but it will reside on the network.

Does anyone see a problem with this model?

Answer 1

You may find that the performance of Subversion operations over the network is much slower than the performance of the same Subversion operation locally. I've run into this problem in Unix land with working directories mounted over NFS, but I suspect you may run into the same situation using Windows shares.

It would be worth comparing the performance in different situations to see what the impact will be.

Answer 2

We have the exact same model as you between Win10 developer machine and AIX server mounted via smb. My experience of using this setup is that every SVN operations from Windows is very slow (especially the svn check for modifs. Several minutes for a big project). Plus, if you run parallell svn operations from win and command line AIX on the same working copy, you will usually end up corrupting the WC and having to check out a new one.

We do this because the project compiles on AIX and we would like to compile and test our changes before comitting them. What we usually do is edit the sources from windows with usual IDE but do every svn command from CLI directly with AIX svn client (i.e windows is only modifying files while AIX does all the svn work)