Performance in Subversion vs. SourceSafe

Question

We're a distributed team of 5 developers working on rather large integrations project. We currently use SourceSafe (yes I know it sucks but it has just worked until recently and we've used it forever). Our biggest problem has recently become performance. Checking in and out project just takes forever and we're finding ourselves spending a lot of time just waiting for SourceSafe (yes we've turned off anti-virus check and all the other performance boost trix - it's still slow).

We're now looking into setting up and moving all our stuff to Subversion instead. How is performance in SourceSafe over the web compared to Subversion? I guess that the history isn't that important to move (we could just go back to the VSS database if we need an old file) and the the actually moving of files to Subversion should be a problem - right?

I'd also like to have some input on tools and add-ons that are "must have" besides the actual Subversion core tools.

Answer 1

Visual SourceSafe is built on top of file sharing. So when you book in a file everything is done using the file system. So instead of just sending the files text to a server and everything happening remotely VSS accesses physical blocks from the disk when accessesing the vss server. Including looking up the file in the shared disks directory etc... This is roughly 10 times slower than a client server bespoke protocol.

There is a product called SourceOffSite which adds a faster front end to the VSS database which makes VSS usuable over slower links.

Tony

Answer 2

TortoiseSVN is indeed a very nice client, and I use this in combination with Trac on the server to have web access to the repository and a nice wiki / ticket system.

LiveCD - link.