TFS Branching and Disk Space

Question

I've been thinking over some branching strategies (creating branches per feature, maybe per developer since we're a small group) and was wondering if anyone had experienced any issues. Does creating a branch take up much space?

Answer 1

Last time I looked, TFS uses copy-on-write, which means that you won't increase disk space until you change files. It's kind of like using symlinks until you need to change things.

Answer 2

James is basically correct. For a more complete answer, we need to start with Buck's post from back in 2006: http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2006/02/22/tfs_size_estimation.aspx

Each new row in the local version table adds about 520 bytes (one row gets added for each workspace that gets the newly added item, and the size is dominated by the local path column). If you have 100 workspaces that get the newly added item, the database will grow by 52 KB. If you add 1,000 new files of average size (mix of source files, binaries, images, etc.) and have 100 workspaces get them, the version control database grows by approximately 112 MB (60 KB * 1,000 + 520 * 1,000 * 100).

We can omit the 60KB figure since branched items do not duplicate file contents. (It's not quite "copy-on-write," James -- an O(N) amount of metadata must be computed and stored during the branch operation itself, vs systems like git which I believe branch in O(1) -- but you're correct that the new item points to the same record in tbl_Content as the source item until it's edited). That leaves us with merely the 520 * num_workspaces * files_per_workspace factor. On the MS dogfood server there are something like 2 billion rows in tbl_LocalVersion, but in a self-described small group it should be utterly negligible.

Something Buck's blog does not mention is merge history. If you adopt a branch-heavy workflow and stick with it through several development cycles, it's likely tbl_MergeHistory will grow nearly as big as tbl_LocalVersion. Again, I doubt it will even register on a small team's radar, but on large installations you can easily amass hundreds of millions of rows. That said, each row is much smaller since there are no nvarchar(260) fields.