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we've recently been experiencing performance problems with our Subversion setup - updates consistently take three or four minutes, even when there are only a couple of small files to update. We run Subversion internally on a Linux server, and have Linux command line clients and Windows Tortoise clients. However the slowness affects Linux too so I don't think it's an antivirus problem. It used to be fast, not sure what's changed recently.

I was just wondering if anyone had any recommendations about how to troubleshoot this? As far as memory and disk space go there doesn't seem to be a problem, and looking at the list of processes with top when an update is happening doesn't show anything at 100%. The server and clientes are all on the same internal network too. I've got full access to the server so happy to try any suggestions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks, Dave

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I just installed RabbitVCS (a TortoiseSVN clone for Linux - rabbitvcs.org) and now command line SVN runs as fast as it should... perhaps installing RabbitVCS installed some other libraries that were necessary to make the SVN command line client run properly? I'm not sure but for now it seems to have fixed it... – fishwebby Jul 5 '10 at 8:46

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What protocol are you using? If its http, you will need to look at your Apache setup too.

If nothing on the server is 100% CPU, then the problem is more likely to be network based, or subversion server is having difficulty reading the files from the disk - so check out the server disk IO.

Even so, 3-4 minutes is a major slowdown, so I would think something major is going wrong. iostat or iotop are disk perf monitoring tools, or use an all-in-one monitor like saidar or nagios

Your RabbitVCS fix is not likely to have done anything (if it affected Windows and Linux clients), chances are whatever was hammering your server has stopped... for the time being at least.

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Hmm, it does indeed seem odd that an unrelated piece of software has fixed it. Thanks for the suggestion of the monitoring tools, I'll take a look at them (nagios looks very comprehensive). Alas (or not!) the problem hasn't come back since I installed RabbitVCS... not that I'm complaining as it works fine now... if it does come back though I'll see what nagios tells me! Cheers, Dave – fishwebby Jul 14 '10 at 6:22

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