What are your tricks for optimizing your Subversion configuration?

Question

For a Linux or Windows system, what tricks do you do to optimize your Subversion server?

The following are my current tricks for a Linux system serving over Apache with HTTPS and backed by Active Directory using LDAP authentication.

• Enabling KeepAlive on Apache
• Disable SVNPathAuthz
• Increase LDAP Cache
• Using the FSFS storage method instead of BDB
  • Feel free to call this into question. I don't have hard proof that FSFS out performs BDB, only lots of tribal knowledge and hearsay.

Solution 1

I can't say much about the performance difference between BDB and FSFS, but I can definitely say that FSFS is far more stable. I'd suggest using it over BDB simply to preserve your sanity. When we had a largish repos running on BDB, we had to run recovery on it at least once a week, often several times. It was irritating. Now that we use FSFS, it's been rock solid.

Solution 2

"svnadmin pack" is a neglected documentation command, but ran it often may be helpful especially if your commits are small.

Comments

[phil_w]

thanks for the reminder about KeepAlive! It is indeed very helpful: I am presently doing svnsync between europe and Asia, and 'KeepAlive On' doubled the performance!

[David Pashley]

+1 I wish I could give you more votes. If you're using BDB, you're doing it wrong. Had so many problems when using BDB. Since using fsfs, we've had none.

[Scott Markwell]

Thanks for the input, I've been running FSFS for the past 3 years, when ever it switched over to the default, so haven't hit such an situation (thankfully). Good to know I shouldn't bother. :D

[Scott Markwell]

Excellent, this feature is under-documented but I found some good information at blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2009/03/…

[AndyMeFul]

@Scott Markwell The updated link is blogs.collab.net/subversion/2009/03/… (you'll be prompted to login at the above).

[d-_-b]

One of the primary reasons for me using SVN was that it had FSFS repos. I use to build the bleeding edge just for this feature.