What are your experiences running SVN on Windows?

Question

I'm curious to hear the experiences of those who are currently running their SVN server on Windows.

Jeff Atwood has a post on how to setup SVN as a Windows service. It's a great first step, but it doesn't touch on other topics, such as:

• What to use for a web-based repository browser? WebSVN can work on Windows, but it ain't pretty.
• How to manage the passwd file?
• Is it possible to integrate with Active Directory without running Apache?
• Strategies for backing up the repository.
• Useful global ignore patterns for Visual Studio development (suggestions here, here, and here for example).

Our company switched from SourceGear Vault to Subversion about one month ago. We've got the basics down pat, but would love to discover people's tips and tricks for running SVN in a MSFT world.

Answer 1

Use VisualSVN Server. It integrates with Windows authentication and it handles all the apache setup. It's as painless as SVN can be on Windows.

Answer 2

VisualSVN is the way to go. The built-in Active Directory support is very easy to use.

Answer 3

I have found that VisualSVN is about 50% slower than running SVN as a native service. I always assumed

that was because of accessing via http:// with Apache, which seems like it would have to be slower

than accessing via svn://, which is native TCP/IP.

The Experiment

In the last 30 minutes, here's what I did:

• Installed VisualSVN on port 8080, side-by-side with my existing SVN install
• Imported three existing repos into VisualSVN
• Kicked everyone else off the server
• Did side-by-side comparisons of a full svn checkout

Results

Repo 1: 652 files, 273 directories, 60.1MB
  23 seconds for VisualSVN over http:// 
  16 seconds for SVN over svn://

Repo 2: 4623 files, 964 directories, 127.9MB
  2 minutes, 18 seconds for VisualSVN over http://
  1 minute, 30 seconds for SVN over svn://

This is on identical hardware, with the exact same repository. I like how easy VisualSVN is, but AD integration and GUI aren't worth a 50% performance hit.

Anyone else seen this difference? Am I doing something wrong just following along with the default installation options?