System Requirements

Operating System

See the Source Distribution 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 the developers will be working, you will 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 you have a small to normal size project (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. 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).

• A few reasonably large projects using CVS are:
  • Mozilla.
  • 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.