cvs update is slow
Christopher Brooks, 29 Oct 2001
Last updated: 17 Apr 2002

There are many reasons why cvs update could be slow.

Network Connectivity

• Reboot - Often the quickest solution.
• In a separate window, trying pinging gigasource while running the cvs command, and then hit Control-C and look for dropped packets in the output.

  ping -t gigasource
  

  SSH has a hard time with packet loss greater than 3%.
• Be sure that names are properly being resolved, try

  nslookup gigasource
  

• Sometimes it seems like starting over and checking out a new tree is necessary. This is especially true if you have been having network connectivity problems because of dropped packets.
• (A long shot): If no packets are getting through and your machine is usually on the UCB EECS 171 network and now you are at home connected via modem, then you might have route problems where your machine is routing 171 net packets to the ethernet port instead of the modem. If this is the case and you are connected via modem, run

  route print
  

  and be sure that you have no 171 network entries.

CVS

• Use cvs -t update to get a trace and see what cvs is doing. CVS may appear to hang if you it is updating a large file.
• CVS can use compression, see the -z flag. You can force CVS to always use compression if you have a ~/.cvsrc file that looks like

  cvs -z 9
  update -P -d
  

  The cvs -z 9 uses compression when ever you run any cvs command.
  While you are setting up a ~/.cvsrc file, add update -P -d. This causes cvs update to Prune empty directories and create new d directories. Note that the -d in cvs update -P -d is different than the -d in cvs -d :ext:gigasource.eecs.berkeley.edu:/home/cvs
• Be sure that CVS_RSH is set to ssh.
  Under bash, if you installed the GSRC CVS for Windows distribution, you will see something like:

  $ echo $CVS_RSH
  C:\Program Files\Ptolemy\CVS SSH\ssh.exe
  

• Be sure that HOME is set to your home directory.

SSH

• Verify that ssh is working with ssh -v gigasource cvs --help