On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Phil Pinkerton <pcpinker...@gmail.com> wrote: > Question from a client: > > Does Subversion support checking out to a "network drive" many miles away ?
Yes, but the performance can vary tremendously depending on the network topoloogy and the network drive technology. A CIFS or typical windows share, for example, is fine for a small branch. But for the kind of Gigabyte working copies I've been dealing with lately, it's *horrid* and takes over 30 minutes, even for very capable Subversion servers in the same building, using svn access. NFS shares take only three in my particular environment, even > They are asking due to extremely slow checkouts across a WAN to a NAS > drive. I need a technical answer with regards to the performance of > subversion in this scenario. ( as if speaking to a 10 year old ...mgmt > haha ) See above. One workaround is to keep a working copy nightly updated from the trunk, do an ordinary CIFS copy, and do "svn update" or "svn switch" to branches with that working copy as necessary. This is what I know some people are doing. Others have switched to Linux to use NFS shares, which take only 3 minutes for the same operation. Subversion does many things well, and it's a popular tool, partly due to its well understood, centralized management. For CIFS checkouts of large working copies, other technologies (like git) kick its tail. And for being able to do local checkins of updates and only push changes to a master copy as desired, git is far superior. And the ability to GPG sign tags makes up in mahy ways, for the less centralized management.
