Can I make time-lapse view in perforce faster?

Question

I have problem with perforce. I like perforce's time-lapse view function very much. It helps me to find who did mistake. The problem is when some file is pretty big and frequently changed, opening time-lapse view takes very long time. So, I need some function like SQL (select * from time-lapse data top 100), that means I just need lasted 100(or 50? 20?) changed history to find what changed recently. Do perforce have that function? or is there any kinds of plug-in or perforce's commmand? Or I want to hear your know-how how to find changed history faster. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I love time lapse view, but I often start with the "File History" view. Since, as you point out, the most interesting changes are the recent ones, I generally look through the recent changes and their descriptions first. Often, I see a change that looks particularly interesting and I study that changelist by itself and see what I'm interested in.

Regarding the speed of time lapse view, I wonder whether the problem is on your server or on your client. A couple things to try:

1. Is time lapse view also slow when you try it on a colleague's workstation?
2. If you run 'p4 annotate >tmp', is that also slow?

If 'p4 annotate' is fast, you might find it worth using for those particularly large files with very long histories. Time lapse view is very powerful and easy to read, but it collects a vast amount of information from the server, and then must format that information for display.

In my case, when I bring up time lapse view, I'm generally planning to study the results for some time, so I'm willing to wait a few seconds while it loads.

If the problem is that your server is overloaded, you should contact your Perforce administrator and see what he can do. Perhaps he can add more resources (typically memory) to your server, or perhaps you should consider deploying a read-only replica, which can service operations like time lapse view entirely from the replica without requiring any cycles from the main server. Perforce technical support is always happy to help with problems like these.