[p4] Is Sync -f trouble?

[Dave Lewis]

On 10/31/06, Venters, Cheryl <Cheryl_Venters at intuit.com> wrote:
> 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.

Thats a lot of files, but not enough to cause slowdowns of this size, imho.
How many users, are they all using p4win?  Do they have the
"poll server every 10 minutes" option turned off?

I haven't used p4 tag, so I do not know what its performance hit might
be.  Generally we determined the highest changenumber for the
set of files in the client, then synced to that and recorded the #
For reporting and most purposes, this is the most useful/effective
approach.  My guess is that the tag operation might be intensive.

But, I would recommend that you check the time it takes to do these
various build steps, such as the tagging, etc.  Sometimes it is just
one thing that is much more inefficient than the rest.
Some operations will also lock the DB to a longer/greater degree
than others, thus causing other requests to be blocked.

Have you set maxresults and similar parameters?  This can make
a big difference.

> 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.

2 hours is quite a long time, that almost sounds like an obliterate
running somewhere!

Well, as usual, being in the middle of a release always seems to bring
out the worst problems.

dave

> 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
>