Over the last few months my SVN working directory has grown to about 11Gb. I use TortoiseSVN client which works great but recently my machine (3GHz P4 with 1.5Gig Ram) started to run super slow any time I accessed a file or tried to browse a directory. I thought I had a virus at first but after running countless scans, I was sure I hadn’t (half scans really as I got bored waiting but I’m confident I didn’t have anything). Some research last night revealed that large working directories can slow down explorer as Tortoise is trying to recursivley look through all the directories to see if any of them are under version control.

You can disable this in TortoiseSVN->Settings->Icon Overlays->disable “Show overlay status icons recursivley”.

Once I did that, things sped up alot. If down the line it starts to get slow I can dsable icons completely and it should run as explorer should without any TortoiseSVN interference.

I also deleted a ton of directories in my working directory which I wasn’t usng anymore which might have helped as well.