Tortoise svn requires many tries to do anything

Question

I use Tortoise svn along with about 20 others at our site and all have an ongoing issue with it. Whenever you choose any command (update, commit, or ANY item of the right-click menu) there is almost always an initial lack of repsonse from the software. That is, it hourglasses for a few seconds and then does nothing. So you repeat the request, and it quite often still doesn't work, with same symptoms. It will typically work on the 3rd attempt, but sometimes it takes a 4th and on rare occasions even a 5th try to get it to run he command. Maybe 10% of the time it works first time.

The other symptom is that it gradually builds up multiple TortoiseProc.exe processes (I currently have 8 of these running), some of which maintain a lock on certain files so you have to kill the process to regain full access to the file. But I'm not sure if this is a result of these issues or not as it is not a '1 to 1' relationship between the number of failed commands and the number of processes. In a typical day I might execute 6 Tortoise commands, but this will have taken say 10 - 12 attempts to get them to work.

One theory is that PGP is causing issues, as all data exists on mounted PGP drives. But hard to understand why it takes a random number fo attempts, and always works in the end.

This is slowly driving us all nuts and any thoughts would be appreciated.

Glenn

Answer 1

Well, if the theory is that PGP is causing the issue, why don't you try from a drive that isn't encrypted, and see if that fixes the problem? Is your source code so sensitive that it needs to be on an encrypted drive?

I've used TortoiseSVN for a while, and I've never had the sort of problem you're mentioning, so it does sound like something in your setup is causing a problem.

Answer 2

I’d be trying to take the client out of the picture so you can establish whether it is indeed a Tortoise a problem or the root cause is at the server. Why don’t you try just using the Subversion command line directly from your PC to perform functions which are performing poorly with Tortoise? If this is ok, you might also want to try running Tortoise directly on the server to take the network out of the equation. Keep trying to remove the variables which could be causing the problem and you’ll narrow it down to a root cause pretty quickly.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if this is exactly related to your issue but I have found TortoiseSVN can sometimes be quite slow when dealing with repositories that have a lot of files in them. This manifests itself in the tsvncache.exe process taking up a lot of memory. The tsvncache.exe process scans files and folders and associates the familiar icons with them to denote changed/ignored etc. files.

A fix for this is to tell Tortoise SVN to only cache the folders you are working in and ignore the others. To do this, right-click your project folder and select TortoiseSVN->Settings->Icon Overlays. I have Exclude paths set to c:\* and d:\* (basically ignore all fixed drives) and Include paths set to my projects folder.