[cvsnt] Can History-File cause Performance issues?

[Bo Berglund]

On Fri, 01 Sep 2006 12:57:16 -0400, Chuck Kirschman
<Chuck.Kirschman at Nosp_am.bentley.com> wrote:

>I think this is one of those things that is only seen by larger users, 
>but we definitely found it to be a problem.  We regularly got up over 
>100 MB history files, and some repositories cleared 500 MB and were 
>heading for 1 GB.  As near as I can tell, CVS still does not have a 
>solution to this problem.  What we ended up doing was writing a simple 
>script to keep roughly the last 3 months of data; usually 30-50 MB. 
>This had substantial performance benefits when running a "cvs history" 
>command, but smaller effects on other operations.
>
>Rather than lose information, we stored the pieces we clipped out of the 
>history files in other files with a time stamp in the name.  So now a 
>"cvs history" will only show data for the past 3 months.  However, when 
>we need to go back further, we can use a combination of greps to extract 
>the information into a single history file that we can then query.
>
>I do not believe there is any way for the history file in one repository 
>to influence any other repository.
>

If you have a recent CVSNT server, then why not enable auditing and
switch off the history file stuff altogether?
With a proper database you get so much better possibilities to search
for stuff and create all kinds of reports.


HTH

/Bo
(Bo Berglund, developer in Sweden)