If you’re a programmer of some description and you use SVN and develop on Windows then chances are you’ll either be using SVN with TortoiseSVN, or you’ll be like one of those trendy kids using GIT. However, those cool kids don’t yet have something like TortoiseGIT. But I’m sure that once it comes out that these optimizations will still apply.

The part of TortoiseSVN that really slows down PC’s is the “TSVNCache.exe” file. This basically allows for drawing of the icons on-top of files and folders to indicate their SVN status. However, doing this requires a lot of monitoring of literally all your files and folders. So whats the most obvious thing to do? Restrict what Tortoise monitors as it goes about its work. We do that as follows…

1. Right click on your desktop and select “Settings” from the Tortoise context menu.
2. In the tree view on the left select “Icon Overlays”
3. In the “Exclude Paths” box put in C:\*, this will exclude the entire drive from being monitored. You’ll want to put in the drive names of all your fixed drives to stop those being monitored as well.
4. In the “Includes Paths” box put in the root of your development directories, I only use one, however you may use many scattered across your drive. I simply put in C:\SVN\*
5. Press “ok” to apply these changes.
6. Either reboot your machine, or, if your like me, open up task manager and kill “TSVNCache.exe” and load up a folder associated with SVN and it should re-start itself.

Other improvements can be made by setting Tortoise to only show the icon overlays when you are browsing directories with explorer. By default whenever you have an open/save dialog it will load in and show you those. These can be disabled by the following…

1. Right click on your desktop and select “Settings” from the Tortoise context menu.
2. In the tree view on the left select “Icon Overlays”
3. Check the box for “Show overlays and context menu only in explorer”
4. Press “ok” to apply these changes.
5. Either reboot your machine, or, if your like me, open up task manager and kill “TSVNCache.exe” and load up a folder associated with SVN and it should re-start itself.