Speed up TortoiseSVN cache process (TSVNCache.exe) and lower your disk I/O activity

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of disk I/O activity in my Windows coming from TSVNCache.exe process which was killing my disk performance. TortoiseSVN cache process checks repository checkouts for changes and displays nice overlay icons in Windows Explorer.

Instead of disabling the cache, you can optimize the paths where TSVNCache.exe looks for repositories so it only actually looks at working copies and not your whole disk(s) drive(s).

If you keep all of your working copies in one location, this is a dead simple:

1. right-click on your desktop and click TortoiseSVN -> Settings
2. in the tree view, click on to Look and Feel/Icon Overlays
3. in the Exclude Paths box put all your hdd letters (eg: C:\* d:\*) and separate the values with newlines.
4. on the Include Paths box, put all your working copies locations, again separated by newlines (eg: d:\dev\*).

Notice the * – sign at the end of each path, this is necessary to include/exclude subdirs.

that’s it. here are just some words for robots: svn, subversion, windows, slow, problem.