Opinions please: SVN to manage large web development projects

[Jonathan Oxer <jo...@ivt.com.au>]

I'm considering using SVN to replace a combo of CVS and manual methods
for managing web application development resources, and was wondering if
there was anyone on the list doing similar things that could give me
some real-world impressions.

I've done a bit of testing and it seems to do what we need (although the
import is slow when dealing with 100MB+ projects). Basically, I want to
be able to manage about 8GB of files, consisting of all the usual things
used in webapp development: HTML, PHP, Perl, Photoshop, GIF, JPEG, etc,
spread across about 70 projects and accessed by developers on Linux,
Windows and MacOS X platforms.

And yes, I realise it's alpha and I shouldn't trust my life to it etc,
but I don't see any major danger as long as I always keep a copy of each
project checked out onto a file server just in case, maybe with a cron
job that keeps it updated. Then if SVN blows up we can grab things from
the file server.

I see in the list of active repositories that some people are using it
for web sites and there's one repository at 5.7GB, so it seems my
requirements aren't particularly outrageous.

Opinions?

Jonathan Oxer
Ph +61 3 9723 9399 / Fx +61 3 9723 4899
GPG key: http://www.ivt.com.au/gpg/jon.oxer.gpg

Re: Opinions please: SVN to manage large web development projects

[Gustavo Niemeyer <ni...@conectiva.com>]

> I've done a bit of testing and it seems to do what we need (although the
> import is slow when dealing with 100MB+ projects). Basically, I want to
> be able to manage about 8GB of files, consisting of all the usual things
> used in webapp development: HTML, PHP, Perl, Photoshop, GIF, JPEG, etc,
> spread across about 70 projects and accessed by developers on Linux,
> Windows and MacOS X platforms.

Unless there's some strong reason to keep all these projects in a single
repository, you should separate them in their own repository.  That
gives something like 115MB per project. No big deal.

> And yes, I realise it's alpha and I shouldn't trust my life to it etc,

If possible, you shouldn't trust your life in any software at all. :-)

> but I don't see any major danger as long as I always keep a copy of each
> project checked out onto a file server just in case, maybe with a cron
> job that keeps it updated. Then if SVN blows up we can grab things from
> the file server.

Berkeley DB does a good job at backup tasks and recover from failure.
Having such a backup around can save you more metainformation as well.

> I see in the list of active repositories that some people are using it
> for web sites and there's one repository at 5.7GB, so it seems my
> requirements aren't particularly outrageous.

Indeed.

Before putting that repository up, I've researched and discovered some
Berkeley DB repositories of 100GB+. Also, our tests proved that it was
possible to keep such a large repository in a PIII 500MHz machine.
This machine has also suffered a few of problems (broken fan, out of
memory, out of disk, etc) without breaking the repository (sometimes
db_recover was needed). Thus, right now I'm quite confident with
subversion's stability. Of course, that's my experience. You should go
there and look for your own. :-)

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer

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Re: Opinions please: SVN to manage large web development projects

[Karl Fogel <kf...@newton.ch.collab.net>]

Jonathan Oxer <jo...@ivt.com.au> writes:
> And yes, I realise it's alpha and I shouldn't trust my life to it etc,
> but I don't see any major danger as long as I always keep a copy of each
> project checked out onto a file server just in case, maybe with a cron
> job that keeps it updated. Then if SVN blows up we can grab things from
> the file server.
> 
> I see in the list of active repositories that some people are using it
> for web sites and there's one repository at 5.7GB, so it seems my
> requirements aren't particularly outrageous.
> 
> Opinions?

You should be okay, if you're keeping backups as you describe.

You *might* want to wait until some of the scalability and stability
issues have been addressed (issues #860 and #689, for example), but
it's really up to you.  Good luck...

-K


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Re: Opinions please: SVN to manage large web development projects

[Noel Yap <ya...@yahoo.com>]

--- Jonathan Oxer <jo...@ivt.com.au> wrote:
> Opinions?

Guys, please correct me if the following is wrong: One
thing to consider is that there's currently a bug that
allows the client to time out when working with
directories with many files (on the order of
thousands).

Noel

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