I just started using subversion myself and signed up for a free test account at CSDude and I was having the same problems using TortoiseSVN and CVSDude. I don't quite have my speeds -that- bad but the max transfer rate I've ever seen was around 4kb/sec
Looks like a slow svn Server... A "svn update" with tortoisesvn takes a few seconds only here (using svn:// over OpenVPN over a 12mbit/s line).
Try comparing TortoiseSVN's performance to svn update command on the command-line and you'll probably not see any major differences... Perhaps the remote server is just slow or has bandwidth limits. Also bear in mind that http/https is stateless and thus a bit chattier than the arbitrary svn:// protocol.
As a TortoiseSVN user i can tell you thats NOT normal, the problem is with your network probaly.
Can you post a ping and tracert to your svn server and to google?
I've had the problem before with TortoiseSVN.
...it was my connection. When the connection is strong, TortoiseSVN can perform very well, including on very large projects.
So your host or connection are the likely culprits.
What version (client and server) are you running? In 1.4.x, there was a new binary delta format introduced for client/server communications that can reduce the bandwidth consumption by about half. Also, 1.5 offers many new features that can reduce bandwidth consumption during merges under certain circumstances (by not repeating parts of a merge). Unfortuantely, merges in 1.5 are slowed down a lot by the extra processing, so unless it's a bandwidth bottleneck, that probably won't gain you much.
In the configuration somewhere, there's an option to turn off updating the Windows icons automatically. Try that.
Tips how to optimize TortoiseSVN (source - TortoiseSVN FAQ - Optimize performance):
Tell TortoiseSVN where your working copies are:
TortoiseSVN -> Settings -> Icon Overlays and for example:
Exlude paths: "C:\*"
Include paths: "C:\projects\*"
Show overlays only in explorer
TortoiseSVN -> Settings -> Icon Overlays enable "Show overlays only in explorer"
If this tips doesn't help this issue please see also "TortoiseSVN seems very slow on big directories".
It may be unrelated but using svn icons makes your pc slow..
so i set icon overlays to None..
it makes your pc faster...
I experienced slow commit times when I included a 1 MB XXX.mdf file in my solution. I don't know whether it was the size, the type, or locks on the file by the ASP.Net development server. But since I removed it, it's been fast again.
I am experiencing the same problem with TortoiseSVN being slow, only on Windows 7 x64. Checkout command takes 10 minutes to do anything, but once it gets going it's fast. The server is not the issue since it works fine from my XP machine...
I noticed TortoiseSVN really slow when I first installed and used it. The problem I had was not with Tortoise, rather that my virus checker was checking every file I committed. With the virus checker temporarily off, it sped up tremendously.