Did you catch the Tortoise today?

In most software development projects reaching the end goal often feels like one of Zeno's paradoxes.  You know what has to be done in how much time, but somehow you never really seem to catch that tortoise. However, contrary to the original paradox, in this case it may just be the Tortoise that slows Achilles down.

If you are a developer working on large projects, you have a MS Windows operating system, you are using subversion as your source control management system (SCM) and you are using TortoiseSVN as a client, this might just make your day...

Don't get me wrong. I like subversion! There are many SCM systems and all of them have their pros and cons. Subversion is flexible, very stable, non invasive, easy to manage on the server side and scales very well. On the client side however it has a rather large footprint. About twice the size of the code actually in the repository, mainly because it keeps a base copy of  all checked out files.

In order to work with the checkout you need a client program to manage your local copy. As so many developers I use TortoiseSVN (beside commandline tools and Subclipse), because every now and then it is very usefull and one of the best in its sort.

There is however a problem with TortoiseSVN and it is called TSVNCache.exe! This is a sub process that TortoiseSVN starts to monitor the status of your files. It allows the TortoiseSVN shell extension to show the pretty overlay icons in Windows Explorer, which is handy, but at what cost?

I found out about this 'feature' when I was wondering why my harddrive was rattling all the time when there was nothing to rattle about. Of course I had already disabled all stupid desktop search tools (watch out Vista users!). As it turned out it was this process and it actually turned out to be in second place, just after my virus scanner (with scan on access), when it comes to disk IO.

Fortunately, it turns out to be very easy to disable this. Just go to TortoiseSVN => Settings => Look and Feel => Icon Overlays (in the context menu) and set it to 'none' or to 'Shell' if you really like those pretty icon overlays. This effectively disables the TSVNCache.exe subprocess  and stops the stupid rattling :)

Ok, so now your system is much faster, but you don't have the pretty icons. My advice is to get used to it. For one, these icons wheren't that informative to start with. Yes it was a nice visual indication that a file had changed, but it didn't incicate whether or not you had added an unversioned file in any particular subdirectory so you had to check the pre commit dialog anyway. If you wish to know the status use that and get a full view, or even better just use the good old command line 'svn stat' and get an overview you know you can trust.

Happy coding

Bram

ps. If you are on linux or solaris check out the FUSE and more specifically SCORD!