23 messages in com.perforce.perforce-userComparison to SourceSafe| From | Sent On | Attachments |
|---|---|---|
| Lind...@sprynet.com | 07 Jul 1998 07:50 | |
| Jeff...@weblogic.com | 07 Jul 1998 08:00 | |
| Fran...@ti.com | 07 Jul 1998 08:16 | |
| Brad...@email.mot.comBrad_Appleton-GBDA001 | 07 Jul 1998 08:39 | |
| Greg...@sgi.com | 07 Jul 1998 08:44 | |
| EdMa...@wrq.com | 07 Jul 1998 09:03 | |
| Tim....@westmerchant.co.ukTim.Meadowcroft | 07 Jul 1998 10:28 | |
| Davi...@home.chat.net | 07 Jul 1998 11:28 | |
| WesP...@softweyr.com | 07 Jul 1998 20:41 | |
| WesP...@softweyr.com | 07 Jul 1998 20:46 | |
| Scot...@seanet.com | 07 Jul 1998 21:46 | |
| Rich...@geodesic.com | 08 Jul 1998 01:42 | |
| Eric...@Adobe.COM | 08 Jul 1998 08:28 | |
| EdMa...@wrq.com | 08 Jul 1998 08:45 | |
| Scot...@seanet.com | 08 Jul 1998 08:58 | |
| Nick...@pobox.com | 08 Jul 1998 09:05 | |
| Davi...@home.chat.net | 08 Jul 1998 09:15 | |
| Davi...@home.chat.net | 08 Jul 1998 09:15 | |
| Scot...@seanet.com | 08 Jul 1998 09:18 | |
| Greg...@sgi.com | 08 Jul 1998 09:31 | |
| Scot...@seanet.com | 08 Jul 1998 10:05 | |
| Nick...@nvidia.com | 08 Jul 1998 12:08 | |
| Davi...@home.chat.net | 08 Jul 1998 13:46 |
| Subject: | Comparison to SourceSafe |
|---|---|
| From: | Scot...@seanet.com (Scot...@seanet.com) |
| Date: | 07/07/1998 09:46:24 PM |
| List: | com.perforce.perforce-user |
On Tue, Jul 07, 1998 at 09:42:12PM -0600, Wes Peters wrote:
% 1) It's slow. Perforce is waaay faster.
If you're working over a WAN link, it's not just slow, it's glacial. One of our Java developers, working on a 256K link shared with 20 other engineers,
Try it over a 33.6K (well...probably 26.4K) modem link some time...a relatively small-ish portion of our source tree took about 50-60 minutes to download (i.e. populate an empty directory with sources) with SS. Perforce (and StarBase/StarTeam - another client/server type of SCM system for Windoze platforms) took around 20-25 minutes for the same chunk of sources.
Syncing is another story altogether. Since the P4 server tracks the state of the client workspace, it doesn't have to do needless compares of files that haven't changed at all. It DOES mean that we have to be more careful if we occasionally hack files without checking them out for editing (or do regular 'p4 diff -se' type scripts to check our files against the depot).
We were losing files constantly, that's when we switched to Perforce at my "most previous" employer. We got tired of restoring from backups once a month. Our network was experiencing reliability problems and SourceUNSafe crumped.
We had some corruption problems with SS, but not as bad as once a month. An interesting thing is that in running (& testing/debugging the mostly working pre-release version of) the VSStoP4 conversion script that I got from Perforce...a few of the version gets failed (presumably because of old corruption problems), so I had to add some tweaks to the conversion scripts to allow such failures to be non-fatal.
And, I'd like to point out again, it is absolutely GLACIAL on slow links. I don't know if this is a legacy of the file-sharing model of their client, or some problem in the SMB-like protocol, or what, but it really stinks on performance.
That's my guess...when we were looking for potential replacements, I was just avoiding anything that didn't have a client/server over-the-net with no file system level access sort of approach. And also that client-state is maintained on the server, I think.
Yes, yes, a larger user base of relatively small sites, and only somewhat more integrated. The latest Perforce DLLs do everything that SourceSafe does, which is 95% of the functionality of SS and about 15% of the functionality of Perforce. With Perforce, you have the GUI and the CLI tools to augment the boneheaded functionality built into the MS IDE, with SourceSafe you have nothing.
Well...the P4 GUI doesn't do some things that I've wanted to do before (e.g. admin tasks, stuff related to "working offline" - 'p4 diff -se', et al). I keep suggesting that it'd be nice to have an embedded tcl/tk interpreter in the GUI along with some exposed functions, so I could extend the GUI myself. But I've gotten used to the command line (and will probably get used to the p4.el emacs support when I get some time to play with it), so I don't know that I'd use the GUI much anyways.
Perforce: my choice. I've convinced two former employers and my current one to go with it; I put my job on the line with them and they haven't failed me yet. ;^)
There are a few things that would be nice (e.g. some sort of "trigger" support - - I keep wanting to cause things to happen on a client when a particular file or group of files is sync'd to the client; the ability to have "hard links" in the depot to get the same file to map to several different locations on the client), but that's normal for a useful tool anyways.
--- Scott Blachowicz sab at seanet.com