Merge Branches performance

jtaylor · Post by **jtaylor** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 5:29 pm

My company is using the "Merge Branches" tool in our workflow, and there is some grumbling about its speed as our codebase grows. In general, rather than do a merge like this:

$/Current -> $/VersionXYZ

we'll do two or more isolated merges, like so:

$/Current/WidgetA/Database -> $/VersionXYZ/WidgetA/Database
$/Current/Area51 -> $/VersionXYZ/Area51

Of course, it would be faster for our developers to not have to work around the performance in this way. It seems like a lot of the wait is for Vault to retrieve the full history, but 99% of the time what we're merging is at most a few days old, and most of the time it's something we just finished a few minutes ago.

Would it be possible, then, to provide a doohickey in the Options dialog so a user could force Merge Branches to only pull history within X days? Does something similar already exist?

Thanks
Jason Taylor

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 4:16 pm

We don't have a doohickey at the moment. However, we do have a feature request logged for the ability to just merge the latest version of a branch into the target. We are working on improving the performance of Merge Branches for Vault 4.0, our next release.

jtaylor · Post by **jtaylor** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 4:32 pm

Thanks. I'd like to officially request this doohickey then (changes within N days in Tools/Options), because just merging the latest usually won't work. If developer A is making changes for the trunk, and developer B is making changes that are for the trunk and the branch, B will need to pick and choose, because A may have made trunk-only changes in the same file(s). No matter how fast merge branches is in 4.0, it would be faster, and return a lot less data to read through, if it could be configured to just show the last N days' worth of changes.

Jason