FreeBSD CVS Question

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:

> I have a FreeBSD box that's on all of the time (my NFS and Samba
> server), so I just run cvsup from cron on that to copy the CVS repo,
> then do a cvs checkout over NFS onto local work machines.

FYI, I've often found that tunneling CVS over SSH is substantially faster
than NFS.  This appears to be a property of CVS doing some sort of
explicit pipelining, whereas with NFS, it spends a lot of time blocked on
synchronous stat() operations against the CVS repository.  Of course, last
time I used CVS over NFS seriously was on 10mbps ethernet, so this well be
a non-event with gigabit.  :-)  Setting up the SSH connection is slightly
more expensive, but the reduced apparent latency makes a big difference. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research