On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 6:02 AM, Douglas Pearson <b...@sunnyhome.org> wrote: > During an "svn update" or "svn commit" my understanding of SVN is that it > walks the local folder tree, placing some sort of lock file within each .svn > folder. > > The operation is then executed and at the end, the locks are removed. Hence > the need for the "clean up" command if the operation crashes for some > reason. I assume this is done to ensure that you can't corrupt your working > copy by running two operations at the same time on the same working copy - > with no doubt disastrous results. Seems reasonable. > > My question - is there any way to run without those local locks? > > We have a really big folder tree (~5GB of data and ~100,000 files in a huge > number of folders). Currently the time spent locking and unlocking the tree > significantly dwarfs the time spent working on the tree (we normally are > only changing a tiny fraction of this data). So for automatic (non-human > controlled) tools using SVN it would be nice to disable the locking, so > updates and commits were faster. For the developers out there, think > continuous integration server. We'd be happy to take on the risk that if we > ran two commands at once we've blow up our working copy. That's pretty easy > to guarantee never happens with a single lock around the whole process. > > Anything we can do to get this speed up? > > Thanks, > > Doug > > P.S. Please include me directly in any replies. I'm not currently > subscribed to this list.
You are right, the locking of big trees in a Subversion working copy is very expensive, especially on Windows and/or on network filesystems (NFS, CIFS, ...). See this issue in the issue tracker: http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3369 (Locking strategy inadequate for decent Windows Performance) (you may be able to achieve better performance on *nix operating systems, with a filesystem that's fast with small files, and with a fast local disk (SSD if you want the max, but a 10k rpm disk should also be pretty good), YMMV) The bad news is: no, you can't really disable this right now. The good news is: this issue should go away with the upcoming 1.7 release, which contains a complete rewrite of the working copy system. It may still take a couple of months before it's released, but it will definitely be worth it :-). Cheers, -- Johan
