SVN/TortoiseSVN painfully slow

Question

I'm experiencing painfully slow operations with one of our SVN repositories/projects.

For example, it's taking 5-10 minutes to revert the changes in one small file (10 KB). Or about 40-60 minutes to check out the project of 100 MB.

There are about 30 other projects on the same server, some vastly bigger than this one, and none of them preform like this.

One thing to note is that this project is a Magento project. It's not very large in terms of disk space, but I have 23k Files and 11k folders, and I have read SVN preforms badly when there are lots of little files; is this true? And is there anything I can do to speed things up?

Answer 1

The Subversion working copy performs quite badly when there's a huge number of directories, like in your case. For write operations (even only locally) to the working copy, the working copy has to be locked, which means that a lock file is created in every directory (that's 11k file creates), then the action executes, and the those 11k files are deleted again.

Subversion 1.7 is moving to a different working copy format, that should resolve these problems. Until then there's a few tricks you might try to speed things up, like excluding the working copy from your virus scanner, disabling file monitors on the directory (like TortoiseSvnCache), and trying to reduce the total number of directories. (Perhaps by checking out a few separate working copies)