I run windows in a VMWare partition. At times, TSVNCache.exe process starts doing some weird things (Seems like its doing an endless loop of I/O operations). Suddenly my whole VMWare session starts slowing down. My mac heats up badly. In the sense its freaking hot.
My question is what is this TSVNCache process anyway ?, seems like I can do pretty much everything on the SVN repository without it.
It's what produces the overlaid icons in Explorer that tell you whether files/directories are modified, conflicted etc or not.
There have been several fixes to it recently, make sure you have the latest version of TortoiseSVN. Performance will also improve if you minimize the set of things SVN has to check - tell it to ignore any temporary directories, object file directories etc.
It's the tortoise SVN icon overlay process, disable icon overlay in tortoise settings for it to go away. If you want to see the icon overlays, (the icons indicating if a file is updated, modified, conflicted, etc in windows explorer) you will have to kill the process when it hangs, and press f5 or restart windows explorer so it restarts and shows the icon overlays correctly and updated.
The process looks for stattus changes in the background. By default it will watch all files on your system so you should restrict to the directories where you have checkouts. Go into TortoiseSVN -> Settings -> Look and Feel -> Icon Overlays and set Exclude paths and Include paths. Also if you don't care about seeing deep status the in "Status cache" change from "Default" to "Shell"