p4win seems to do a large number of p4 transactions when starting up. At first I assumed it was just doing "p4 files //...", or similar, to build its directory hierarchy, but the speed doesn't scale linearly with the connection bandwidth, so my guess is that it does a large number of transactions, possibly even one for each file. That way the scaling is by transaction latency (setting up and tearing down a p4 transaction), not bandwidth (just listening to a stream), which fits our observations.

With a fair-sized depot (p4 files //... | wc says 116296 files), served from FreeBSD, across a slowish transatlantic connection (IP latency 300-1000ms, bandwidth 10-30KB/sec), p4win can take 30-45 _minutes_ to start up. On a machine on the same ethernet as the server it is much faster but still several minutes. We have reported this to Perforce. We haven't tried with an NT server (why would anyone want to serve anything from NT? :->)

Nick Barnes