FreeBSD CVS Question

[Richard Coleman]

Robert Watson 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

If you are using NFS, why do a cvs checkout on the clients at all?  Just 
do the checkout once (on the NFS master) and mount /usr/src on the 
clients.  I'm doing this for both src and ports using the procedures 
outlined in the development(7) man page.

But I do agree with Robert that if you want to do an actual cvs 
checkout, use ssh instead.  Once you've created ssh keys and defined 
CVS_RSH, it's just as convenient as NFS and faster.

Richard Coleman
richardcoleman at mindspring.com