Repeated Performance Degredation & Clean Up

Since upgrade to SmartSVN 7.x.x, I find that I am constantly bombarded with messages from SmartSVN that it has detected possible performance degredation, along with recommendations to perform a cleanup of various parts of my working copy, from the root to various svn:externals.    This is almost certainly due to the sheer size of my working copy and externals. That said, it would be nice to resolve this issue since it certainly hints at some kind of bug or issue in SmartSVN since I'm not managing the working copy with any other SVN tools. How can I help resolve this issue? I'm happy to provide any information I can. Feel free to get technical, I've been using SmartSVN for a very long time, and written a fair amount of low level SVNKit code even.

Last updated 9 years ago

Bump    I'm gonna bump this in the hope of getting some kind of official response, as this issue is a constant, if relatively mild, annoyance.

Hi there,   Can you try SmartSVN 7.6 and let us know if you still have problems please? We made a number of performance improvements with this release, so hopefully you'll see a difference.

I'm running 7.6 and I get bombarded with this message too. In my case I don't notice much difference before or after I run the "clean up". Merges and branch swiching in SVN is glacial "by design" so if the degradation factor only 2-3x I probably wouldn't notice.  I'd prefer it if SmartSVN would run a clean up automatically when I switch branches and similar (something I do many times a day), or just shut up about it.

Hello aheid,   We have SmartSVN 8 now and again there have been some performance improvements so I'd recommend giving that a go.   Of course, if you're still seeing this on 8 I can look into requesting a future improvement that might prevent the repeated messages - I understand how annoying that might be for you and indeed other users.

Thanks for the follow up Liam. I'm planning to install version 8 this week, I'll post some feedback on that.  It would be nice to know what sort of performance degradation the message warns about though. Is it general for all operations or are some operations (merging or annotating fex) affected more than others?

Thank you aheid, I do strongly recommend using 8 now and look forward to any feedback you have on it.   The performance degradation will be related to client side operations, specifically refreshing. The clean up should stop the message popping up.

So been running version 8 for a couple of weeks now, and I did get the message twice (once was mere minutes after I did a clean-up due to aborted branch switch).   However that's just twice, which is considerably less than I used to get. So I'm pleased so far.  Though I would still like an option to make SmartSVN auto-cleanup when switching branches or updating, if it deems it necessary.

Hi aheid, good to hear back from you. Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you're pleased so far. There should be further performance improvements in the next few releases too. With regard to the possibility of an auto-cleanup in SmartSVN (it's actually a Subversion issue, not specific to SmartSVN), it's possible that there could be false positive detections and as it's a working copy modifying action it was decided best to be left for the user to decide whether or not to run cleanup.

liam.mclennan;165699With regard to the possibility of an auto-cleanup in SmartSVN (it's actually a Subversion issue, not specific to SmartSVN), it's possible that there could be false positive detections and as it's a working copy modifying action it was decided best to be left for the user to decide whether or not to run cleanup.

  I think indeed there is a false positive. Just a couple of minutes ago I got the message again. However I'm sure it's a false postive, because the repository was updated before I shut SmartSVN down and I got it immediately when firing it up again.  Here's what happened. I have two copies of the same repository, one is permanently switched to some branch (c:\prog_old). The other contains trunk (c:\prog). SmartSVN only "knows about" c:\prog.  I had just updated the trunk when I needed to fix something in the other branch, so I shut down SmartSVN, renamed c:\prog to c:\prog_trunk, and c:\prog_old to c:\prog, and fired up SmartSVN and my IDE, and fixed the bug and committed to the branch.   The reason for this setup is that we have some IDE components which we have under version control, and thus require that the working directory always has the same path. Switching from trunk to the branch and back can take 10+ minutes, renaming is much faster.  So after fixing the bug, I switched back by shutting down SmartSVN (using the tray icon) and my IDE and renamed things back (c:\prog -> c:\prog_old, c:\prog_trunk -> c:\prog). Then when I started up SmartSVN and it immediately showed the "clean up" message.  Is there some cache that's not kept in the respective .svn folders that may cause this perhaps?  edit: switching branches like this is something I do quite frequent, hence if there is some non-local cache or similar, that could explain it.

Hi aheid,   We think that in this case the message is shown because the timestamps for a considerable amount of the files at least do not match the timestamps in the SVN metadata.  The message essentially means (usually), that the file stamps were different (indicating change), but the actual file content is the same (no change). This results in a performance problem, since each status has to compare all of the file content instead of just comparing dates.  I suspect that with the performance improvements expected in the 8.5 release candidate you will see a further reduction in these performance issues.

Thanks for the feedback Liam, I'm not sure how the timestamps could change in this situation, but at least it's something I can look into (if for nothing else to settle my own curiosity). Perhaps the IDE components are to blame.  In any case, I'll be looking forward to the 8.5RC.  Thanks again.