RE: CVS update/checkout performance

[Arthur Barrett]

CP,

> seen a significant degradation in performance 
> over the last few months.  

> The client is 1.12.9 on Windows 2000 
> The server is  1.11.21 on Solaris 8 

Try running the same checkout / performance tests on the server, then
try on an other solaris server in the SER and then on the desktop to a
disk and to a null pipe (ie "cvs co -p > nul:".  

This will give you some idea as to whether the performance bottleneck is
the network or the PC or the PC's hard disk.

The most common reason for bottlenecks on Windows PC's is anti-virus on
the disk or network sniffer anti-virus.  Also note that if your sandbox
(the destination of the checkout) is on a "network drive" you are
creating twice as much network traffic...

> - There are a several binary files in the 
> repository but most of the files are plain text. 

CVSNT 2.5.04 (GPL/free on solaris and windows) may be a better choice
because rather than sending the entire binary file it often sends just
an MD5 checksum (eg: update when the timestamps have changed and
status).  However because CVSNT has ACL's and Audit it may actually work
slower depending on the features you have enabled...

> - We branched the code about 2 years ago and 
> never went back to the head. All work is done 
> on this 'main' branch, including new branches.

You get the best performance if the majority of work is performed on the
Trunk - this is part of the design of CVS.  

Regards,



Arthur