[cvsnt] checkout slow if network involved

[Arthur Barrett]

Stéphane,

You've spent a fair amount of time on this already - I strongly recommend you look at the cost/benefit of our professional support and on site installation:
http://march-hare.com/cvspro/?lang=EN&pdf=4


> Running the checkout on a separate machine is much much slower. 

Then it's the network or the "separate machine" (or A/V / Firewall software on the server).

Try this as a "test command" rather than a "real" checkout:
windows:
cvs co -p module > nul
unix:
cvs co -p module > /dev/null

This will do the checkout but not perform any disk i/o on the client since the output is directed to the nul device.  If it's A/V or a bad client disk then this will run quickly.

This won't rule out any firewall software - which is my personal best guess.

> I've tried with a hub and even with 
> a direct cable link between the 2 ethernet cards. 

That doesn't rule out a fault in either network card.

> The problem I am facing seems to be an network outage 
> (the checkout takes 20 files then stops for a second 
> or two, then continues). 

Sounds like some other process interfering on the client (A/V / Firewall), or a bad network card.

> Note that I am facing the exact same problem with 
> a Redhat Enterprise setup with a "standard" cvs server.

If that is a different physical server then that rules out the server network card, but not the client.

> Any idea?

So the remaining choices are:
1) client network card
2) software on client

Try a different physical client machine, preferably with a minimum install of windows (no A/V no firewall no 3rd party software including disk drivers).

You can also enable server tracing in the CVSNT server and then on the client create a trace "cvs -ttt co module" 2> trace.txt" which includes timestamps on each "step" so you can "see" exactly when the pauses occur, and that may help identify what hardward/other software is interfering (or it may not).

Someone else on the list recently found this problem was client hardware related too.  They changed a router between the server and the client and it all began working fast, but several clients all shared the same router and only one experienced the problem indicating it was probably a combination of cable/client card/hub.

Regards,


Arthur Barrett