TortoiseSVN The coolest Interface to (Sub)Version Control

To show you the file and folder icon overlays TortoiseSVN must fetch the status each time you open such a folder in the explorer. This usually takes a fraction of a second, but can take much longer if you have either a slow hard disk or a very big directory.

Here are a few things to watch out for:

• Network drives can be very slow to respond, so you may have to turn off icon overlays for such drives. However, the caching scheme usually makes it workable.
• Whenever the last modified time of a file changed, TortoiseSVN needs to do a complete diff (!) of that file to find out if it has changed. If you often change a file, undo the changes and save the file again you'll encounter a slowdown in browsing. You can fix that condition by doing a Cleanup of your working copy folders.
• There are several Virus scanners around that interfere with TortoiseSVN. Most of the time they lock files inside the .svn Status directory, which can cause TortoiseSVN to hang or to become very slow. Sometimes you might even get an Access Denied error.

  Try to configure your virus scanner so that it ignores .svn directories.

• If you're working on Windows XP then you can also disable the zipfolders. This will also increase the browsing speed.
  1. Select Run from the start menu
  2. Type regsvr32 /u %windir%\\system32\\zipfldr.dll at the prompt and click ok
  3. The change will take effect immediately, but you may have to restart Windows for all traces of the built-in ZIP support to disappear.

  If, at any time, you wish to re-enable Windows XP's built-in ZIP support, just follow these steps:

  1. Select Run from the start menu
  2. Type regsvr32 %windir%\\system32\\zipfldr.dll at the prompt and click ok
  3. The change will take effect immediately, but you may have to restart Windows for all traces of the built-in ZIP support to be available.
• Check your system for spyware, policy enforcement software, or local search engines (like Google desktop). Those can all interfere with normal use quite effectively.