TortoiseSVN file overlay performance - are there any ways of improving it?

Question

I'm using TortoiseSVN on my development machine (running Windows Server 2003) and VisualSVN Server on the server side. Both are the latest versions (against Subversion 1.6.5).

Everything works well generally; however I'm getting a little frustrated with the TortoiseSVN file overlays (the little icons that show locked or modified statuses on the files in Explorer). Sometimes these overlays seem to update instantly after a commit or lock, sometimes they only change after a couple of refreshes, and sometimes they show completely the wrong status until the next reboot.

It might be an impossible question to answer, given the amount of variables (other installed software, for example), but are there any known tricks to speed up the updating of these overlays?

Answer 1

By far the biggest performance increase I got was to set the client's Icon Overlays to not process the whole hard drive, only the locations my SVN files live in.

To do this, open the settings (right-click in Explorer->TortoiseSVN->Settings), select Icon Overlays, then in the Exclude paths: enter c:\*

In the Include paths: enter the paths to your Subversion working copy directories (for me all are under c:\subversion\* and c:\workspaces\*)

Use a newline to separate entries (see screenshot)

This made the client seem a thousand times quicker.

This screenshot shows how to exclude c: and d: drives, just including the relevant directories:

You can get some more performance tips from the TortoiseSVN docs.

Answer 2

You could disable TSVNCache.exe altogether. I decided I was willing to live without updated icons if it meant I could open and close Visual Studio orders of magnitude faster.

You could also lower the priority of TSVNCache, which is what my boss did with success. The main problem we were having was startup and shutdown times of Visual Studio, so he wrote a batch file that lowered the priority of the process and then started VS.