https://subversion.apache.org/reporting-issues.html directed me to report issues to this mailing list.
With svn 1.8.x (tested 1.8.3 and 1.8.5), "svn log" is very slow against older svnserve (tested 1.4.6) when specifying any path other than the root of the repository. eg. $ time svn log -l1 svn://host/repo > /dev/null real 0m0.039s user 0m0.008s sys 0m0.011s $ time svn log -l1 svn://host/repo/trunk > /dev/null real 5m55.153s user 0m0.670s sys 0m0.197s This is a repository with about 35k revisions. From a glance at wireshark, it appears as though the svn client is downloading the complete log history before printing out any log messages. Older svn clients do not have this issue (tested 1.6.17 and 1.7) Thanks, Peter Harris -- Open Text Connectivity Solutions Group Peter Harris http://connectivity.opentext.com/ Research and Development Phone: +1 905 762 6001 phar...@opentext.com Toll Free: 1 877 359 4866