[p4] Re: Why is Perforce better than CVS? - Dave Foglesong - com.perforce.perforce-user

14 messages in com.perforce.perforce-user[p4] Re: Why is Perforce better than ...

From	Sent On	Attachments
Africa, William	12 Aug 1999 12:12	.bin
Michael Cook	12 Aug 1999 12:33
Eric Scouten	12 Aug 1999 12:45
Matthew Rice	12 Aug 1999 17:48
Robert Cowham	13 Aug 1999 00:38
PETERS MW Mr -NUCLEAR	13 Aug 1999 08:05
Scott Blachowicz	13 Aug 1999 08:20
Wes Peters	14 Aug 1999 08:41
Scott Blachowicz	14 Aug 1999 09:25
Mark Blair	16 Aug 1999 11:07
Dave Foglesong	16 Aug 1999 11:14
Frode Randers	24 Aug 1999 03:07
Robert Cowham	24 Aug 1999 03:18
Frode Randers	24 Aug 1999 03:33

Subject:	[p4] Re: Why is Perforce better than CVS?
From:	Dave Foglesong (dfog...@Adobe.COM)
Date:	08/16/1999 11:14:12 AM
List:	com.perforce.perforce-user

One more plus for Perforce that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet: Perforce tech support. Although the CVS user community is responsive, and you can purchase CVS support through other companies, it's not anywhere near the same level of support you get from Perforce.

During our eval of Perforce (about a year ago now), they were willing to answer a LOT of questions, fix problems in the server software and send us new versions, and provide temporary 40 users licenses so we could hammer a depot and test server under real world loads -- all before we had given them any money. Once we did purchase our licenses, they have continued to respond to support questions nearly instantaneously. Even when they can't provide a fix, they acknowledge if there is a problem that will be looked at in the future.

Support is an intangible that can't really be quantitatively expressed when you're creating the chart of pluses and minuses of products to present to management to get a purchase order signed, but it can make a huge difference in your use of the product.

-----Original Message----- From: Mark Blair <Mark.Blair at tus.ssi1.com> To: perforce-user at perforce.com <perforce-user at perforce.com> Date: Monday, August 16, 1999 11:00 AM Subject: Re: [p4] Re: Why is Perforce better than CVS?

Scott Blachowicz <Scott.Blachowicz at seaslug.org> wrote:

And a major component of the speed improvement (I think) is that the p4 server maintains what it the client state is. [...] I don't know what your layout is like, but in our case - p4 server at one developer's house on one end of a 384K ADSL line and the other developers now accessing it via 64K to 384K (ISDN/ADSL), NOT doing file system type accesses is a BIG win...especially across Windoze "net use" type remote file system mounts.

About a year ago, when I was evaluating various revision control systems to replace SourceSafe in my group, I tried syncing a large project across a 2B ISDN link with Perforce. It took about 40 minutes, which seemed like a long time at first. When the sync completed, I did a 'du' to see how much actual data was moved, and discovered that during that 40 minutes Perforce managed to fill about 96.6% of the full 128k bandwidth with actual user data. And that was before data link compression was available. On the other hand, SourceSafe took a half hour to present a login prompt across the same link. I was amazed at how quickly Perforce crammed my data through that ISDN line. I doubt that FTP would have been any faster.

I maintain a departmental Perforce server with over 30 active users, containing about 7000 files and almost 2.5 million lines of source code. My server runs under Linux on a Pentium Pro 200, along with a web server which provides support for my Perforce users. Right now, the server has been running over 8 months since its last reboot. The Perforce server daemon has been unavailable for no more than a total of 3-4 hours during that time, and most of that was during the upgrade to version 99.1 (it was not necessary to reboot the OS, but I did bring down p4d while I worked around some minor incompatibilities I discovered). Most of the time I have spent administrating this system has been in the development of new scripts to take advantage of Perforce's features. The day-to-day overhead of keeping the system running is almost nil. Most of my users never report any problems, and all of the reported problems have been due to user error so far.

I'm temporarily on loan to a department which uses CVS a lot. I think other list members have provided many concrete CVS vs. Perforce examples, so let me just say: "YUCK!".

I highly recommend Perforce, due to its speed, reliability, ease of use and administration, and its high level of scriptability. It has its problems, but I have found them to be very minor compared to the headaches I have had with other systems.