Friday, 6 February 2009

Subtle changes to Tortoise SVN increase machine performance

For the last I don't know how long, I've been complaining about the speed of my work desktop machine. It's a dual-core with 2GB RAM running XP but it runs like an absolute pig. A colleague of mine recently did some digging and found that unless you make some subtle changes to Tortoise SVN it does quite a bit of unnecessary work in the background.

Quote from colleague:

"I think a significant factor in our machines being slow is Tortoise performance as it is monitoring and caching all file modifications (it is the biggest user of CPU time on my box).

This article makes some recommendations -

I’ve followed a couple and it seems to have made some difference:

1. Right Click->Tortoise->Settings – Icon Overlays Tab

Add excludes to all drives.

Add an include to your working directory only.


2. Remove all currently unused source directories - > I have removed the branches etc and only have MF and MIS trunk checked out for instance."

Also, doing the following can help if you don't mind losing the pretty overlay icons on some of your files:


Select status cache = none.

This means you lose having meaningful icons on the your source folders, but the rest of tortoise works – commit/update/get modifications etc.

I can live without the icons….

Since making these changes I have seen a marked difference in how my machine responds...hooray!

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