SVN Maintenance

Question

We have been using SVN at my workplace for a few years now and we really haven't done any kind of maintenance on it besides updates and backups since we installed it. Is there anything else we should be doing to maintain SVN or is what we've done all we really need to do?

Answer 1

See Repository Maintenance in the svnbook, especially the Cleanup section.

Your Subversion repository will generally require very little attention once it is configured to your liking. However, there are times when some manual assistance from an administrator might be in order. The svnadmin utility provides some helpful functionality to assist you in performing such tasks as

• modifying commit log messages,
• removing dead transactions,
• recovering “wedged” repositories, and
• migrating repository contents to a different repository.

Answer 2

Subversion is basically maintenance-free if you are using FSFS on the back end. The BDB back end is a little touchier.

If you're using 1.6 (quite recent) on the server, you should consider doing a dump/reload and then running svnadmin pack to take advantage of server-side improvements in FSFS which make the repository more space-efficient.