Upgrading a VERY old SVN Repository

Question

We currently have an SVN Server, using VisualSVN Server as our front-end server, and most clients are running both VisualSVN Visual Studio extension and TortoiseSVN.

The current repository we have is going back a while... it was created, by my guestimate, around 2006(!), and the format file says it's Version 1... which seems to be a pre-1.5 repository...

We are in the process of moving servers around and one of the servers being upgraded is the SVN box. Last time we did an upgrade, we just did a svnadmin hotcopy on the repository folder, installed a fresh install of VisualSVN server on the new machine, copied files over, pointed stuff in the correct direction and, well, it worked...

With this new upgrade, I am wondering what we can do to the repository to give it some new life? Speed increase, less space taken up (the whole repository currently weights about 13Gb), and well, more performance. I know I said performance / speed twice, but given the old machine we upgraded from was a 32bit P4 with about 4Gb ram (3.6Gb usable), and the new box is a Quad Core Xeon with 32Gb RAM and we have pretty much the same speed as we originally did, it would be nice to show something, speed wise, from the upgrade...

Any ideas?

Answer 1

See the Subversion 1.6 release notes at http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html#repos-upgrades.

Apache Subversion 1.7 uses the same repository format as Subversion 1.6 so the entry also applies to SVN 1.7.

There are two options to upgrade the repository format:

• You can perform a dump / load cycle on the repository. This can result into a smaller repository size and overall better performance,

• You can upgrade repositories format with a command-line: svnadmin upgrade <path-to-repository>. Upgrading to the current repository format can result into a smaller repository size.