Q: I'm encountering performance issues refreshing a working copy accessed through a symbolic link. For example I have a symbolic link named 'myProjects' in my home directory which links to /media/projects. When I use the command 'svn status myProjects/projectName' the operation is a lot slower than when I use 'svn status /media/projects/projectName'. Is this a known issue, can it be resolved?
A: Yes, this is a known problem. SVNKit supports versioned symbolic links and in order to resolve them uses expensive native program calls (ls). In case some of the working copy directory parents is a symbolic link, such calls are performed for every file in the working copy (because their absolute and canonical path differs and there is no way to say file is a symbolic link or not, but calling ls command for it).
There are two workarounds for this problem:
1. Put your working copy or refer to it by it's "real" path, not by the one that includes symbolic link, that is what you already doing.
2. Disable versioned symbolic links support in SVNKit. To do that set the following System property:
-Dsvnkit.symlinks=false
(above is an option that you should add to the command line you're using to start your application)
at runtime you may call:
SVNFileType.setSymlinkSupportEnabled(false);