CVS slow and TCP Compression

[Scott Willy]

We have installed cvs on a Cobalt Cube (Linux) and had some bizarre behavior
which we would like to share.

We have been using cvs on a Solaris server for 18 months or so and decided
to get a Cube and dedicate it to cvs. After installing cvs on the cube we
did some tests and all seems to be working fine. We took repositories with
1000's of files of source code and do checkouts no problem (and very fast).
Then...

We did a test with repositories containing libraries of big (100KB-2MB)
jar/dll/exe files (and not C++ or java source code). After a few files, the
checkout would slow to a craw. If we left it long it enough it would finish
the checkout, but it was too slow to be usable.

We found a workaround by using the -z option to set the TCP compression to
something other than zero. Anything between 1-9 seems to work just fine. The
checkouts of the large files is fast.

Bizarre...

Another observacation we had, was that when doing a checkout we would get
tons of Ethernet collisions on the LAN. This was true for both the Solaris
server we have in production and the Cube we were testing. This was true
even if we only had cvs server and one client on the LAN.

We still had tons of collisions using our workaround (-z), so they might not
be part of our problem, but...

We would be most interested if anybody else has seen something like this or
has any comments.