Severe speed problems with binary files

[John Beranek]

We use CVS where I work for source control of our source tree, and
recently have been seeing some pretty severe speed problems with certain
files in the repository.

I've looked around in the list archives, amongst other places, and found
nothing particularly helpful, so I'm hoping someone on this list be able
to shed some light on the issue.

Firstly some system specs:

The CVS server runs on a Dell Poweredge, with 2GB of memory, 2 Xeon
2.8GHz processors and a RAID 1+0 disc array.

The server runs Redhat Enterprise Linux ES release 3

CVS server version: 1.11.17 (as distributed by Redhat)

In daily use the majority of the 2GB of physical memory is used, and
perhaps 100MB of swap partition is in use.

An example of the problem: (filenames obscured)

*******************************************************************

$ time cvs co tools/xxxx/xxxx/xxxx/docs/xxxx.pdf
U tools/xxxx/xxxx/xxxx/docs/xxxx.pdf

real    3m34.240s
user    0m0.013s
sys     0m0.065s

*******************************************************************

During this operation the load on the server is reasonably low,
certainly not CPU bound. The cvs process on the server uses roughly 25%
of one virtual CPU. (The server has 2 real CPUs, giving 4 virtual).

Some more information, hopefully useful:

**********************************************************************

$ ls -lh /home/cvs/cvsroot/tools/xxxx/xxxx/xxxx/docs/xxxx.pdf,v
-r--r--r--    1 jberanek cvsusers      13M Apr  4 10:56
/home/cvs/cvsroot/tools/xxxx/xxxx/xxxx/docs/xxxx.pdf,v

$ cvs status xxxx.pdf
===================================================================
File: xxxx.pdf     Status: Up-to-date

   Working revision:    1.1.1.5
   Repository revision: 1.1.1.5
/home/cvs/cvsroot/tools/xxxx/xxxx/xxxx/docs/xxxx.pdf,v
   Sticky Tag:          (none)
   Sticky Date:         (none)
   Sticky Options:      -kb

***********************************************************************

The example file has roughly 110 tags applied to it.

We use the CVS server via pserver, but generally the client is run on
the server machine.

So, any ideas?

John.

-- 
John Beranek                         To generalise is to be an idiot.
http://redux.org.uk/                                 -- William Blake