[p4] Slowdown and unquoted wildcard paths

[Shawn Hladky]

I would be surprised if this problem were related to wildcard expansion.  At
the command line, it's the windows command shell that's trying to expand
the wildcard before passing on to the p4.exe... that's where the slow-down
comes from.  But p4v is using the C++ api, which does not have this problem.
I have indeed noticed this behavior in P4V... but it's never been too
frequent or annoying for me.  It does appear to do a fair amount of caching,
and maybe that is the bulk of the explanation.


On 6/5/06, Sweeney, Tony <sweeney at ea.com> wrote:
>
> I remember this.  Under certain circumstances, Perforce would attempt to
> stat a depot path (//depotname) as a CIFS path (\\servername), timeout after
> 30 seconds, then do the right thing.  Have the P4V folks perhaps stumbled
> across the same bug?
>
> Tony.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com [mailto:
> perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Javier Arevalo
> Sent: 05 June 2006 16:46
> To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> Subject: [p4] Slowdown and unquoted wildcard paths
>
> Hello!
>
> In our Windows-based Perforce installation, we sometimes notice that a
> P4V navigation operation (for example, opening a folder to explore its
> contents) suddenly takes a long time to start, then everything goes
> blazingly fast for a number of minutes, then we get the slowdown again.
>
> At first I thought that it might be due to the database being blocked
> during transfer of huge files. However, this is not the case. Major data
> transfers are very rare, and the slowdown appears frequently (if
> unpredictably).
>
> In the docs I finally found a good hint:
>
> "In some cases, p4 commands using unquoted filepatterns with a
> combination of depot syntax and wildcards, such as:
>
>       p4 files //depot/*
>
> can result in a delayed response on Windows. You can prevent the delay
> by putting double quotes around the file pattern"
>
> Now this makes a lot of sense, because in fact the P4V client program
> doesn't seem to be putting double quotes around such commands, which are
> precisely the ones where we notice the slowdown. The pattern of this
> slowdown seems consistent with the Windows networking timings. However,
> due to this erratic behaviour, I haven't been able to verify if this is
> actually the problem.
>
> - Has anyone encountered found P4V to be a known offender in this area?
>
> - Should I notify this potential problem in P4V to the Support team?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> --
> Javier Arévalo
> Pyro Studios
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