[cvsnt] Can History-File cause Performance issues?

[Chuck Kirschman]

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.

chuck

Johannes Kilian wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> running an 2.0.41 CVSNT Server I have serious performance problems.
> 
> I wonder whether a big "History"-file might be the reason?
> 
> We have set up several repositories on the same server - and the hugest history file is about 23MB (the history files in the other repositories are much smaller (approx. 2-3MB each).)
> 
> Now my questions:
> 1.) Can a history file of 23MB cause performance problems within the repository it belongs to?
> 2.) If there are several repositories on the same server: Can a huge history file in one repository influence the performance in the other repository?
> 3.) How can I "clean up" a history file? Which information will be lost, when renaming the current history file and start a new, empty one?
> 
> I think the version of CVSNT may not cause the performance problems, since we are running a second server with the same CVSNT-Version which don't have the problem ...
> 
> Any help welcome ...
> 
> Johannes