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Asked: 2026-05-16T20:28:17+00:00

I’d like to understand how subversion stores revisions in FSFS, and how a view/shapshot

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I’d like to understand how subversion stores revisions in FSFS, and how a view/shapshot is constructed for a given revision number.

What I have gleaned from Googling is that FSFS is a simple directory structure, with sub-directories for each revision like:

..svn/rev/0/
..svn/rev/1/
..svn/rev/2/

Presumably only the changes (deltas) are recorded under each revision directory. So does this mean that when constructing the view/snapshot for revision N, all the deltas from 0 to N have to be looped over?

Any links to resources on this much appreciated.

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Subversion stores all deltas of each revision in one single (flat) revision file. Each file/folder inside the repository (called a “node”) has an internal ID.

    A single revision file consists of all compressed deltas for this particular commit, however the deltas are not against the previous revision, but use a scheme called “skipped deltas” avoiding linear growing search time for growing version history.

    Important is that FSFS uses forward deltas instead of backward deltas using the BDB-backend.
    So FSFS is faster on commits, but slower on checkout, Berkeley DB’s performance characteristic is other way around.

    You can read a lot more inside SVN design note about FSFS.

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