[cvsnt] Strange CVS performance fluctuation

[Tobias Rodenbach]

Hello,

I observed the following strange behaviour, when "many" people tried
to access our cvs server (I counted about 35 instances of cvs.exe).
Then, the CPU usage history of the Windows Task Manager shows that CPU
Usage goes to about 50% for about 10 seconds, then drops to below 3%
for about 10 seconds, rises to about 50% for 10 seconds and so on...
Sometimes CPU usage stays high or low for more than 10 sec but most of
the time it alternates in the 10 second scheme.

In general, the performance is very low. Checking out using a tag
(which is the most common case here) can take up to one hour for
around 6 MB in the local LAN. ("Normally" that takes significantly
less than one minute.)

The host is a Win2003 server with 2 hyperthreading CPUs, the cvsnt
server is version 2.5.02 build 2115.

Does anyone have any idea what could be the reason for this behaviour?

Best regards
 Tobias