SVN hangs on commit – any suggestions for troubleshooting

svntortoisesvn

We're having a problem with SVN… Subversion clients such as TortoiseSVN hang when we commit any more than a few files at a time to our server. Everything appears to actually be committed successfully to the repository; but the client hangs after all the data has been transmitted.

We're using version 1.4.4 of the SVN server. We use the svn:// protocol rather than http to connect.

We've reproduced this problem with several clients: TortoiseSVN (1.6.10), AnkhSVN (2.1), and the Silk command-line client (1.6.12). This is happening for everyone on the team, though some people seem to be more affected than others. If someone commits only a few files, it often works; but with more than half a dozen files, it usually hangs.

Does anyone have troubleshooting suggestions? This has been happening sporadically for a while, but it's become pretty consistent lately. We've been working around the issue by killing the hung SVN client, doing "svn cleanup", and then doing "svn up"; but sometimes that causes tree conflicts. Another workaround is to blow away the workspace and check it out again after every commit; but of course that's pretty annoying.

Are there any diagnostics that could help us troubleshoot this? We're considering upgrading to SVN 1.6 server, and installing the server on a new machine; but we're wondering if there's an easier solution.

Thanks for your help,
Richard

Best Answer

You can try strace svn daemon when the problem occurs to see what's going on there.