I often use tortoisesvn to checkout or update a working copy on a development server. Whenever I do this, it seems to slow down the network and other users complain that browsing websites and accessing files on the dev server is slow.
Is this a common bug in Subversion or has anyone else has come across similar problems?
If your dev server is at a remote site and you're using an asymmetric connection (e.g. ADSL) where the upload bandwidth is lower than the download bandwidth it's possible that you really are saturating the available upward bandwidth, particularly if you're committing large files. If you have a firewall or proxy that's got malware scanners checking the traffic you could possibly also be putting load onto that. A packet shaper or other agent that artificially throttles HTTP traffic might also cause this sort of bottleneck.
On a LAN you shouldn't be loading anything unless you're browsing a biblically large source tree or there's some sort of config or tuning issue on the server.
"The internet is slow" would be a very, very unusual complaint to be caused by browsing a subversion repo.
For "the dev server is slow", why not watch the CPU load, either with Ctrl-Alt-Del-Task Manager on Windows, or the top command on Unix/Linux?
No, this is unusual. Do you commit a lot of large binaries? If so, perhaps you are saturating the available bandwidth due to the large file transfers.
As anyone agreed, this is not a bug, but rather svnserve is eating all your bandwidth.
Nice solution is to limit it using, for example, iptables or trickle.
