Re: git-svn: why fetching files is so slow

From: Seth Falcon <sethfalcon@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 24, 2006, 17:10 UTC
Message-ID: <m2odqwlqi8.fsf@ziti.fhcrc.org>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20061124T143148-286@post.gmane.org>

Pazu <pazu@pazu.com.br> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> ... compared to the standalone svn client. I'm working with repositories over
> the internet, using not-so-fast links, but still, a svn checkout takes somewhere
> around 5 to 10 minutes, while git-svn fetch takes at least 10 times that just to
> fetch the initial revision. Later fetches also take *a lot* more time than a svn
> update would.

[warning: I _think_ this is how it works, but not 100% sure] When you use git-svn to fetch from an svn repository, you make a separate request for each commit that occurred on the remote svn repos. When you use the svn client, it only needs to compute and download one delta .

If you are not already using the Perl SVN bindings (you will need to build svn from source), you should give them a try. They are much faster.

My experience has often been the opposite, but I think that is because I work with an svn repository where I track a directory that has many many subdirs. The svn working copy traversal is so slow that even with the extra network overhead, git + git-svn ends up being faster for fetch (and much faster for any local operation).