A: 

This is more likely to be your network and the amount of data moved as well as your client. Are you using Tortoise? I find it to be a bit slow myself when moving that much data!

Andrew Siemer
I am not using Tortoise but the CollabNet command line client. Also perf monitor showed very low network usage. Is they anything else specific that I should check to see if it is a network issue?
James A. N. Stauffer
You could create a repository on a local computer check in your code there. If it's a network issue it should go lots faster if it's local.But my guess it's a disk issue.
Nifle
A: 

Are you using TortoiseSVN? If so, the Icon Overlays do slow down operations. If you go to TortoiseSVN Settings/Icon Overlays there are several settings you can tweak to control the level to which you want to use the Overlays, including turning them off completely. See if that affects your performance.

William Leara
I have already tweaked them to use shell so that I wouldn't get a hit from its background processing. I just tested turning them off completely and it took 7 minutes so it didn't seem to help.
James A. N. Stauffer
+1  A: 

Do you need every bit of the repository on your working copy? If you truly only care about particular portions of the tree, look into Subversion's Sparse Directories (a.k.a. "Sparse Checkouts") feature. It allows you to manipulate your working copy so it only contains those directories of interest.

Just as an example, you might use this to prune documentation, installer-related files, etc. Depending on what you truly need on your local machine, embracing this approach could make a serious dent in your wait times.

Matt Dillard
I need the whole thing.
James A. N. Stauffer
A: 

Do you run a virus checker that uses on-access scanning? That can really make it crawl. If so, turn it off and see if that helps. Most scanners will have a way to exclude specific directories if that helps.

PowerfulMojo
I already had it configured to ignore the directory with my checkouts. As a test I disabled it completely and it still took 7 minutes.
James A. N. Stauffer
+1  A: 

I experience exatly the same thing. Recently replaced Perforce with svn, but if we cannot overcome the performance problems on Windows me must consider another tool. Using svn 1.6.6, Win XP and Vista clients. RedHat server. My observations matches yours: - Huge disk-write activity. - Antivirus not a bottleneck. - No matter witch svn-clients are used. - No server or network bottleneck. Complementary info More than 3 times faster operations on: - Linux (Ubuntu). - Linux (Ubuntu) running on VirtualBox at Win Vista host. - Win XP running on VMWare at RedHat host.

Peter Friberg
A: 

Nobody seems to be pointing out the one reason that I often consider a design flaw. Subversion creates a second "pristine" copy of the checkout for offline operations. If you're checking out 4G of files, it's actually writing 8G to disk.

Compare a checkout to an export. That will show you the massive difference when writing those second copies.

There's nothing you can do about that.

Dan
That probably doesn't affect update performance. BTW that "design flaw" enables diffs while disconnected from the server so it does have a benefit.
James A. N. Stauffer
A: 

Try svn client version 1.5.. It helped me on my Vista laptop. Versions 1.6. are extremely slow.

FraGMenTaToR