[p4] Is Sync -f trouble?

[Venters, Cheryl]

The one thing I should have added that I failed to mention is we are
running at least 10 builds at one time and all of them are running the
same way. I'm not sure what is considered a lot of files. I know one
build we run does a p4 tag first then syncs to the subsequent label.
That label contains 19000 files.

Our poor performance is usually characterized by slowness. Depending on
the time of day, it can take three to five minutes to simply open P4.
However, today we were seeing the server actually locked for about 2
hours and there were no "unusual" commands happening that I'm aware of.
We have been having a lot of problems and recently moved our db files to
the local drive versus SAN a few weeks ago. We did see performance
improvement but that came to a screeching halt today. We're also right
in the middle of release right now and the build load has increased
dramatically.

Thanks.
Cheryl

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Lewis [mailto:dlewis78731 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 9:09 PM
To: Venters, Cheryl
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Is Sync -f trouble?

On 10/31/06, Venters, Cheryl <Cheryl_Venters at intuit.com> wrote:
> We're still having terrible problems with P4 performance. When I
talked
> to Perforce today, the person I talked to told me we should never be
> running p4 sync -f. All of our automated scripts run the sequence sync
> #none, delete the build directory, sync -f. That has been our policy
for
> a clean build. Does anybody have input on this? And, are there p4
> commands that have a greater potential for hanging the server?

In the scenario you describe, I don't think the sync -f will have
any greater impact than a normal sync. It should also be
unnecessary in this situation.

Does your client contain a lot of files, enough to cause a long
compute time before the sync starts transferring files?

What are the symptoms of your poor performance? Are users
having to wait a long time when they do syncs/submits before
perforce responds?

dave