Optimize performance

If you're working with big projects, you might encounter some performance problems when using TortoiseSVN. Here are some tips to optimize the settings:

• Don't put your working copies on a network share but keep them on your local harddrive.
  There are several problems with working copies on network shares. First, a network share is much slower than your local harddrive. Which means whenever TortoiseSVN has to fetch the status of your working copy (e.g. for a commit, update, or simply to show the overlay icons) it will take a lot longer and use a lot of bandwidth.
  If you can't put the working copy on your local harddrive, at least disable the overlay icons for network shares.
• Reduce the size of your working copies
  If you have any branches of your projects checked out which you don't really need anymore, consider removing them. Because even if you don't work with them, the status cache still has to monitor them for changes and must crawl them to show the overlays.
• Tell TortoiseSVN where your working copies are
  In the settings dialog, Icon Overlays page, you can specify which paths TortoiseSVN should monitor for working copies. If you don't specify them there, then TortoiseSVN must monitor all your mounted drives completely, which can slow down your system too.
  An example: if you have your working copies located in C:\projects, put the path "C:\projects\*" in the "Include paths:" box, and "C:\*" in the exlude box. That will exclude the whole drive C:\, but include all subdirs of C:\projects.
• Show overlays only in explorer
  Many programs use the "file open" or "file save" dialogs of the shell. Whenever they do that, the shell extension of TortoiseSVN is automatically loaded too, which isn't necessary if you don't really need the icon overlays in those dialogs.
  If you don't need the overlays or the context menu of TortoiseSVN in those application dialogs, you can check the box "Show overlays only in explorer" in the settings dialog, Icon Overlays page.