SVN performance after many revisions

Question

My project is currently using a svn repository which gains several hundred new revisions per day. The repository resides on a Win2k3-server and is served through Apache/mod_dav_svn.

I now fear that over time the performance will degrade due to too many revisions.
Is this fear reasonable?
We are already planning to upgrade to 1.5, so having thousands of files in one directory will not be a problem in the long term.

Subversion on stores the delta (differences), between 2 revisions, so this helps saving a LOT of space, specially if you only commit code (text) and no binaries (images and docs).

Does that mean that in order to check out the revision 10 of the file foo.baz, svn will take revision 1 and then apply the deltas 2-10?

Answer 1

We're running a subversion server with gigabytes worth of code and binaries, and it's up to over twenty thousand revisions. No slowdowns yet.

Answer 2

I am not sure..... I am using SVN with apache on Centos 5.2. Works ok. Revision number was 8230 something like that... And on all client machines Commit was so slow that we had to wait at least 2min for a file that is 1kb. I am talking about 1 file that has no big filesize.

Then I made a new repository. Started from rev. 1. Now works ok. Fast. used svnadmin create xxxxxx. did not check if it is FSFS or BDB.....

Answer 3

Maybe you should consider improving your workflow.

I don't know if a repos will have perf issues in these conditions, but you ability to go back to a sane revision will.

In your case, you may want to include a validation process, so a team commit in a team leader repo, and each of them commit to the team manager repo who commit to the read-only clean company repos. You have make a clean selection at it stage of what commit must go to the top.

This way, anybody can go back to a clean copy, with an easy to browse history. Merge are much easier, and dev can still commit their mess as much as they want.