On Jul 31, 2007, at 7:08 PM, Douglas Gregor wrote:
Here's my theory: you are checking out a large repository to a networked filesystem, say, NFS. The Subversion client downloads a ton of data and writes it to many, many small files. The networked filesystem slows to a crawl under the load (creating many small files is a particularly bad case for many networked file systems), and essentially the Subversion client can't keep up with the server that is feeding its data. After a while, the Subversion server gets bored of waiting for the client and closes the connection.
More evidence for this theory... you seem to have said that upgrading from Subversion 1.3.1 to 1.4.x helped a bit. Since 1.4.0 introduced a new, more compact representation of the working copy of a Subversion repository, a checkout with 1.4.x requires much less disk activity (= network activity, for a networked file system) than a checkout with pre-1.4.0 Subversion. So, you wouldn't see the timeout problem as often, because the networked file system is more likely to keep up with the server. - Doug