[knowledgeforge-user] problems with long svn updates from ukparse

Fri Nov 7 17:44:35 UTC 2008

Rufus,

Thanks for your reply.

"Rufus Pollock" <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> 
> The repository is pretty massive (GBs ...) and there seems to be quite
> a few large docs (pdfs, html files) checked in. Thus a raw svn update
> may simply take out the server (any tips on configuring apache/svn to
> avoid this gratefully received)

I'm afraid I've very little experience with configuring svn on
the server, but I note that the version of svn on the server
(1.4.2) is now rather old:

   http://subversion.tigris.org/release-history.html

> When doing raw checkouts it might be an idea to them incrementally
> (e.g. pick particular folders or subfolders and do svn ups on each of
> those one at a time). Perhaps Francis may have useful comments here as
> he knows the repository structure much better than me.

Experience suggests that that does work better, but it's still
not 100% reliable.

My normal procedure with subversion repositories at the moment
is to use git-svn to mirror the repository and then work on it
with git, which works fine with other multi-gigabyte
repositories that I work with.  Unfortunately git-svn with the
ukparse module fails with the server never replying to one of
the client's requests.  (I have a strace of this in case you're
interested in the WebDAV conversation, but I suspect that this
may also be symptomatic of some of the server software being
old.)

[..]
> Does this occur once you have done a complete checkout. At that point
> the updates should be much smaller and shouldn't make the server fall
> over so badly.

It doesn't happen so often, but I do see similar errors once
it's checked out.

> Hope the above is of some use. I should also mention you could create
> a local copy of the repo by syncing the backup via rsync (slowly with
> b/w under, say, 30kb/s) see:
>
> http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/kforge-user/2006-January/000029.html
>
> (You'll just want the ukparse subitem by the way)
>
> Rufus

Thanks for the tip and the other suggestions.  I've set that
going...

regards,
mark