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I have a repository which contains a directory tree. One of the directories is a home for many thousands of files. This directory is very rarely modified, but it makes operations like "svn status on root dir" or "svn update on root dir" so slow that they are no longer practical.

Is there a way to make my svn client skip this directory when it's doing a recursive operation on a parent directory, but behave normally when it's doing an operation on the particular large directory?

Or perhaps there's a better way of dealing with such monster directories?


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2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

You can turn on svn:ignore for the directory before performing the large op and then turn it off when done:

svn propset svn:ignore dirname somedir

This will ignore somedir.

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sorry, svn:ignore won't work for the files in "somedir" that are already versioned in the repository! –  Oliver May 19 '11 at 12:06

Using SSD gives great performance boost to SVN. They're not cheap, but they're worth it if you need to work with huge SVN repositories.

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Makes sense. Too bad I don't control the SVN server hardware :( –  user38329 Oct 29 '10 at 12:33
user38329, the overhead of large directories is likely all on the SVN client side. On the server side, svn mostly deals in revisions, not directories. So if you can do something about the I/O performance of your local machine, that could help a lot. –  slowdog Oct 29 '10 at 16:58

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