System Requirements for CVS

First, the disclaimer: it is hard to offer general guidance which applies exactly to your site. The exact hardware you need will depend on exactly how you use CVS, the expectations of your users, and so on.

Operating System

See our How to Get CVS pages. The INSTALL file in the CVS source distribution has a few more notes concerning specific operating system variations and versions.

CVS client

Any client with enough processing power and memory to run the operating system in question should have little trouble. On the machines on which the developers will be working, you'll want disk space for approximately one working directory for each developer (either the entire tree or a portion of it, depending on what each developer uses).

CVS server

Provided that you have a small to normal size project, say up to 40 developers and 40 megabytes of source, any reasonably fast computer should suffice as a server (say, a Pentium-class machine with 32 megabytes of memory).

For a sufficiently busy server, the sky is the limit of course. For 1000 developers, compare with the hardware which the Mozilla project has, for example.

To estimate disk space requirements, if you are importing RCS files from another system, the size of those files is the approximate initial size of your repository, or if you are starting without any version history, a rule of thumb is to allow for the server approximately three times the size of the code to be under CVS for the repository (you will eventually outgrow this, but not for a while).

For More Information

A few reasonably large projects using CVS are:

• Mozilla, of course.
• Bentley, with almost 100,000 files in CVS.
• EGCS/Cygnus. Something like 170M of sources in CVS.
• OpenBSD. Over 75,000 files (1Gbyte) of source in CVS. They rely heavily on mirrors to avoid letting their main CVS server get overloaded.

Other than that I don't know. Anyone (else) with busy CVS servers want to put up a web page or offer more details (with specifics such as what hardware you have, how much use your server gets, &c)?

For more technical details, with an eye to modifying CVS to be more efficient, see our Development of CVS: System Resources page.