I've seen poor performance on Windows for Subversion checkouts due to anti-virus checking. When Subversion does a checkout, it also creates a second copy of each and every file that is checked out. Plus, it updates other files in the .svn directory. Some anti-virus files scan everything created and downloaded by the Subversion client, slowing down checkouts to a crawl. What takes a few minutes on a Linux or Mac takes longer on Windows machines thanks to an overly agressive anti-virus program.
Since the CIFS is a Windows share, both the Windows Server that owns the share and the Windows Client that mounted the share may be running anti-virus programs that aggressively "protect" the share from malware. You might not normally notice this with one or two files, but when you do a Subversion checkout with 10,000 files in it, you'll start to notice the delays. There are several experiments you could try: * Instead of a checkout, do an export. Exports don't create the .svn directory and all of their overhead. See if this substantially speeds up the operation. Yes, I know this isn't what you want to do, but it'll help determine the heart of the problem. This will transfer just as much data over the network, but it won't create all of those .svn directories and the files they contain. A much faster checkout could point out that the problem is with the Subversion client attempting to create files on the server. * Use Samba on a Local Linux system to mount this CIFS Windows share on a Linux machine. Then, do your checkout on the Linux system. This eliminates the Subversion Windows client. This will eliminate any problems with the Windows version of the Subversion client.. * Perforce likes to claim it is a very efficient checkout system. Download Perforce, and add the HEAD revision of the Trunk of your Subversion repository into a Perforce repository. Now try the checkout on the CIFS using Perforce. This entirely eliminates Subversion from the equation. If there are still issues, it lies solely with CIFS on that Windows server. I know things have changed recently, but CIFS has a reputation for being slow and chatty. See http://bit.ly/aNUF2k. -- David Weintraub qazw...@gmail.com
