Faster TortoiseSVN

I’ve used SVN and the TortoiseSVN client for most projects recently. The combination works well (and contrary to my initial expectation, I’ve found a shell-integrated source control tool quite usable), but sometimes causes annoying slowdowns in Windows Explorer.  But with the help of a post in this anonymous “Professional Blog”, a few minutes of configuration you can speed it up considerably.   Read the post for all the details, but the most important bits are:

  1. Use “include paths” and “exclude paths” to tell TortoiseSVN what areas of your hard drive potentially contain workspaces; it will then totally disregard other areas.
  2. Trim your SVN repository – if you have a big pile of ancient tags/branches you don’t need, delete them, so that TortoiseSVN can’t possibly waste any time looking at them.  Of course this is only useful advice for projects which don’t need all their historical tags and branches kept around.

In upcoming posts I will point out a better tool for using SVN in Eclipse, and a better approach to source control: distributed source control systems.