Re: [boost] [server] Continuing problems with svn operations

Subject: Re: [boost] [server] Continuing problems with svn operations
From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-13 09:45:04

On 1/13/2011 6:31 AM, Beman Dawes wrote:
> I'm using svn a lot as part of the run-up to 1.46.0, but am having trouble.
> svn operations are very slow, and often fail. A typical error message is:
>
> Error: REPORT of '/svn/boost/!svn/vcc/default': Could not read chunk size:
> An existing
> Error: connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
> Error:  (https://svn.boost.org)
>
> Can anything be done about svn problems? I know Rene has already done a lot
> of work trying to improve the situation, but there are still serious
> performance problems.

Recently I had to rebuild my own SVN server. Along the way I learned a 
fair amount of "things" about the SVN server setup. But two unfortunate 
items about this are:

1. I won't have time to really work on tweaking the server for some 
time. Sorry about that, but my daughter is starting daycare and it's 
taking much of my "free time" away :-)

2. I'm now very familiar with the above connection error. It's caused by 
bugs in the WebDAV module that appears only when using it over SSL 
(https). For my own server I had to run a reverse proxy doing the SSL 
(lighttpd -- which has its own problems depending on which version you 
use) connecting to the Apache server running only the WebDAV/SVN on 
HTTP. So the unfortunate part is that there doesn't seem to be any hope 
of the WebDAV stuff ever getting fixed when used with HTTPS. When I get 
back to looking at the server one of my first changes is going to be to 
remove the HTTPS side, and change to non-clear-text authentication to 
both fix the above problem and to relieve a bit more server CPU. But if 
one of the real sys-admins can get to this before I do I would be very 
grateful ;-)

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