Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2005-3-30

Subversion: better the second time around

Last time I tried using Subversion, I installed a 1.0 version on my Debian/woody server, running svnserve behind SSH -- pretty much the same way as I run CVS. This is nice if you already have the infrastructure to run CVS like this, as it lets you use SSH keys for authentication, and SSH keys are really convenient.

However, within a day of starting using it, I found that some checkins were causing the server to grind to a near-halt; svnserve was using several hundred megabytes of memory, and the machine was spending all its time swapping. So I went back to CVS.

Giving Subversion another go now, I've installed the 1.1 version and Apache 2 on a new Debian/sarge server, and now have SSL running (that took ages), so everything runs over HTTPS via Apache rather than SSH and svnserve. It seems happier. This server has twice as much RAM - 512 MB - which may be making a difference, but it seems that either 1.1 or the Apache/DAV route makes things a bit more stable. It's also an fsfs database rather than a BSDDB one.

So: let's see how this goes. Looks good so far; svn rename has already come in handy.

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