Re: Is there a limint on the number of branches in CVS?

[Mark D. Baushke]

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Fran Varin <address@hidden> writes:

> Thanks Larry, I suspected as much. The issue as
> it is described to me from the development team
> experiencing the problem is that when they
> attempt to use the 120th branch it never
> responds to them. They are using WSAD to access
> CVS.
> 
> However, in speaking with one of the team
> members they indicated that they never actually
> close a branch. So, in essence, there are 120
> open branches.
> 
> I'm thinking that they may have run into a
> resource threshold on the server, i.e. memory
> usage, to maintain 120 open simultaneous
> branches. Does this sound reasonable to you?

No, all branches should be considered 'open' in
the sense that they continue to consume a tag in
the repository and this is okay and working as
designed. Neither a branch tag nor a revision tag
consume very much memory at all.

I have seen one repository with literally 700
branches and over 4000 tags total for a given set
of files and over 200K revisions of some key
files. The size of one of those ,v file in the
repository was around ~1.8GB and did take a long
time to manipulate... and it meant that the kind
of filesystem on which it lived needed to be able
to handle 'large' files as it was likely that it
would continue to grow.

So, a number of operations may become slow (such
as adding a new tag or revision), but complete
non-responsiveness is not something I have
observed.

However, while the number of branches is
theoretically unlimited, you will likely have
problems if the <num> in a new branch to be
created such as 1.1.0.<new> gets to the point
where <new> will no longer fit into an 'int' on
the server you are using. If that happens, you
will need to force a commit to the revision of the
file you wish to branch and then continue
branching from that newly forced revision instead.

        -- Mark
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