Question

I am working on a project where the branches folder contain at least 300 different branch (copy of the trunk) which is will no more be used. Since SVN is running more and more slowly I wonder if deleting those branches will make subversion behave operate faster?

Other people in my team say that since the source code will still be on the server, so it wont change anything. (So branch stay undeleted).

But I read something on Subversion before (I dont remember where) saying that HEAD is managed a little bit different that previous version which could increase the speed of the repository.

Which one of these hold true ?

Answer 1

Subversion performance is more related to the load on your server than the size of the repository. Check on disk space and CPU performance, as well as looking into the web server performance (or svnserve on Windows).

If you remove branches, there will still be a repository version that has those branches in it, so they will not be removed. The only way to actually remove content is to dump the repository (svnadmin dump) and then use svndumpfilter to remove the branches in question from the dumped content. The resulting content can be loaded into a new repository without the removed content, and even the revision numbers can be updated.

I am not aware of the HEAD being handled differently in terms of performance. However, copies of the HEAD (or anything else) are cheap, lightweight copies, and should not affect performance.

Can you provide any additional information on which specific operations are slowing down?