A very large directory in a subversion repository

Question

Dear StackOverflow,

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?

Thanks!

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.