Which protocol? svn:// or http(s)://?

svn http protocols
Earlz picture Earlz · Jan 26, 2010 · Viewed 68.8k times · Source

There are four common protocols for network access of SVN.

svn://repos
svn+ssh://repos
https://repos
http://repos

The Wikipedia page doesn't say much about the differences of the four different protocols. I've always preferred svn://, because it is the easiest to set up, but what is the difference and which one is "better"?

Answer

Thomas Bonini picture Thomas Bonini · Jan 26, 2010

http:// has a serious overhead, especially when dealing with thousands of small files. I used svn for a website that had around 50,000 icons, all saved in SVN. With HTTP, it took around 20 minutes to checkout. Once I switched to svn://, it took less than a minute. This is because with HTTP it's one new HTTP request per file.

http:// however has the following big advantage: it usually goes through firewalls. For example, now that I switched to svn:// I can no longer access my repository from my university because of their firewall.

Regarding the difference between using SSL/TLS or not, well, it's obvious: data is encrypted; however it's more difficult to set up.

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