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Colm Troy
Colm Troy

Reputation: 1947

SVN Working Copies on Network Share

Ok, I'm getting my version control processes in order for my web team.

I know ideally each user would have a full working copy of their code on their local machine.

Unfortunately for a lot of our web apps they have additional server specific DB or other system integration requirements that cannot be replicated on a user's workstation (i.e. some servers just wont install on XP, vista etc.)

I'm looking at setting up an area on one of my servers that acts as a working copy for each user but still resides on the network.

i.e.

/SVRROOT/
- Dev1 Working Copy
- Dev2 Working Copy
- Dev3 Working Copy

This means that each user will have their own working space (as per SVN best practices) but it will reside on the network.

Does anyone see a problem with this model?

Upvotes: 7

Views: 2503

Answers (4)

Tug
Tug

Reputation: 15

We have the exact same model as you between Win10 developer machine and AIX server mounted via smb. My experience of using this setup is that every SVN operations from Windows is very slow (especially the svn check for modifs. Several minutes for a big project). Plus, if you run parallell svn operations from win and command line AIX on the same working copy, you will usually end up corrupting the WC and having to check out a new one.

We do this because the project compiles on AIX and we would like to compile and test our changes before comitting them. What we usually do is edit the sources from windows with usual IDE but do every svn command from CLI directly with AIX svn client (i.e windows is only modifying files while AIX does all the svn work)

Upvotes: 1

Cornelius Sicker
Cornelius Sicker

Reputation: 160

At least when using TortoiseSVN it is strongly recommended not to use working copies on network shares, as per the FAQ:

Can I store a working copy on a network share?
This depends on the network share. But we really, really urge you to not do this! Even if you're using a Windows server and use those network shares, the fcntl() file locking is not fully reliable. And for Samba based shares all bets are off. Which means you will get a corrupted working copy and you then will lose data! Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday you will.

I am not sure how this applies to SVN in general.

We also use SVN working copies on Windows network shares and recently ran into problems like occasional changes to file/directory permissions which rendered the working copy unusable.

Upvotes: 0

Bert Huijben
Bert Huijben

Reputation: 19632

Some subversion actions will perform a little bit better if you map the network folder to a drive letter. The apache Apr library performs some extra network requests when you use a unc path instead of a drive letter.

Generally you should just use a local folder for your working copy as the idea is that you can suffice with just backing up the server.

Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 allow most web server scenarios with its mini webserver and most databases can be accessed over the network (or setup per developer). This separates the developers from a single point of failure.

With everybody on a single server a single developer can crash the webserver/database server all developers are using...

Upvotes: 0

Greg Hewgill
Greg Hewgill

Reputation: 994897

You may find that the performance of Subversion operations over the network is much slower than the performance of the same Subversion operation locally. I've run into this problem in Unix land with working directories mounted over NFS, but I suspect you may run into the same situation using Windows shares.

It would be worth comparing the performance in different situations to see what the impact will be.

Upvotes: 5

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