2007/8/1, David A. Greene <greened@obbligato.org>:
On Tuesday 31 July 2007 18:12, Douglas Gregor wrote:
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.
I absolutely agree with your diagnosis.
The problem with Subversion is not the timeouts per se. If that's all that happened, it would be an annoyance.
The problem with Subversion is that these timeouts can sometimes cause working directory corruption. That is absolutely, positively unacceptable for anyone doing critical work. Note that I'm not talking about errors from the network filesystem itself (broken connections causing errors on file I/O, etc.). I'm talking about http protocol timeouts. Subversion should be resilient enough to exit gracefully under such circumstances and it doesn't always do that.
The FAQ mentions some pitfalls: http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#nfs /$