[tahoe-dev] Perforce backend served by tahoe.

[Marc Tooley]

Hey Peter,

I built it purely for evaluation. However, I will either be using it 
plus tahoe for my home backups (manipulating files in an SCM is sooo 
much easier than in something complicated like.. Bacula for example) or 
just tahoe solely. Since I can retype all my existing repository (which 
is about 3-4TB right now) into a Tahoe backend basically on-the-fly, I 
don't have to decide right now, and I can always just switch it back 
with relatively minimal fuss.

My current Perforce repositories contain:

20940 files in (records + hobby projects) representing 425MB
550 files in (library/reference material) representing 551MB
3600 files in (email archives) representing 7GB
98000 files in (software tracking) representing 1GB
25806 files in (websites) representing 378MB
153000 files in (backups) representing 1.1TB

Plus an additional 2TB of media files that should be checked-in but 
currently aren't because until Tahoe came along, I wasn't satisfied 
with any other way of aggregating my dozen or so individual servers' 
storage devices together. "Software tracking" includes complete copies 
and histories and personal branches of MySQL, PHP, Apache, gpsd, ircII, 
lighttpd, mythtv, a pile of quake-related software, SDL, etc.

Anyway, the only reason why I wouldn't be able to use Tahoe for 
everything would be the speed my script works with small files. The 
time it takes to check-out the entire Linux 2.6.9 RHEL kernel with my 
trigger, for example, spans a few hours. That's a pretty long time to 
wait. :-) It's about 1.2 seconds for each individual file.

I might end up just using Tahoe as a *backup* mechanism instead for the 
software tracking/small stuff, and then directly for the big huge media 
backup repositories.

On Monday 29 June 2009, Peter Secor wrote:
> Very cool. I haven't used Perforce before - what size project are you
> using it for? It would be interesting to know how Tahoe will handle
> the "lots of small files" situation over time. The Allmydata
> production grid seems to be doing fine, but a source code control
> application will probably give it (Tahoe) a more specific workout in
> that area.
>
> Ps
>
> Marc Tooley wrote:
> > One of the upcoming features of Perforce which is available in the
> > beta version (2009.1 beta) right now is the ability to override the
> > backend storage of the versioned files with.. well pretty much
> > anything you want, really. All you have to do is write a script
> > which takes three arguments in the form of: