tfs vs svn performace over WAN

Question

CAn someone please let me know what is performance of TFS vs SVN over the WAN. I have a scenario where we have multiple teams set up accross geography. Can someone help me decide on what to use?

More sepcifically i would like to know about TFS 2008 performance. From reading on internet, i understand that TFS 2005 was really bad on WAN. But wanted to know if anyone has seen any major improvements in TFS 2008 performance?

Loisloise

Answer 1

TFS is not really designed to work off-line (even though it is possible to work around that).

Subversion is therefore a better choice when working with an unreliable/slow connection. Modern version control tools like mercurial or git are even better in this regard.

That being said, I'm not sure the comparison is useful. Subversion is just a version control system. TFS contains a version control system, build server, issue tracker, project reporting and data collection services, sharepoint repository etcetera.

Mahdi

Answer 2

This sounds like you want to consider a distributed version control system (dvcs). This works very well as developers can continue to work without internet access and many other advantages.

One that seems to be gaining a lot of traction for developing on Windows is GitHub combined with GitExtensions for Visual Studio (given your reference to Tfs I'm making the assumption this is your setup). Git has a different background but many MS stack projects are moving to it, especially in the scenario you describe and open source ones.

Diner

And, again, a distributed version control system, so DVCS, not d-CVS, is the perfect solution. Great, as always. -1 for the wrong spelling and not answering his question. However, a DVCS over world-wide development groups offers much better performance than anything else. So +1 for that. Finally, the main problem is the intended audience: People who are targeted by TFS share about ... hm.... none common traits but being software developers with people targeted by git or hg. So, how competent are his co-workers? – Johns

@Johns managed to correct my typo a minute before you comment posted ;) on the target audience you raise a good point. that is there something to get with regard to git. a certain discipline would not be misplaced either. however, i've used Tfs and svn and found that both have great features and both have surprising depth. don't underestimate how good Tfs has got, especially around things with build servers with tfs 2008. however you are right and it's typical that only teams that use this have the ones who know the gritty build stuff and those that simply use the UI. – Diner

Answer 3

Depending on the size, expertise and wallet of your team a consideration for Tfs would be to use a Tfs proxy server in the disparate locations.

Diner

Answer 4

Last time I checked, TFS wasn't optimized for low-bandwidth connections - for example, it doesn't send diffs when you update a file version, but just sends you the complete contents of the new file (well, at least it gzips it...).

Jarlathus