Release 1.76 Highlights

The first major SnapshotCM release since August, 2005, SnapshotCM 1.76 focuses on improving performance, with the most dramatic improvement for users accessing SnapshotCM over a low-bandwidth, high-latency network, such as a WAN, dial-up, or VPN from home. In fact, for many operations, distributed performance comes pretty close to matching local performance!

SnapshotCM performance improvements in 1.76 are accomplished by several fundamental changes to the client-server protocol:

• First, we've reduced the number of calls a client must make of the server and thus reduced the network latency effects. Fewer calls means less waiting on the network.
• Second, we've implemented technology that allows the server to send incremental updates for data previously requested. For example, once the file hierarchy of a snapshot has been loaded by a client, changes to that hierarchy will be received incrementally in a single call to the server.
• Third, we continue to compress the data when sending over slower links.
• Fourth, we've added a transparent proxy server for caching revision contents remotely. Once a file revision is cached by the proxy, further requests for that file are handled by the proxy, avoiding the overhead of traversing a slower network.
• Fifth, the server now does larger writes, which compress better and are more efficiently handled by the network.

Combining these key improvements results in excellent WAN performance. For large operations, such as updating your workspace, performance is very close what you get operating on a LAN.

A final bonus is that, with the new release, we've also noticed moderate improvements in local performance as well!

And in keeping with our low administration philosophy, the proxy server is very easy to set up. You specify the repository server and cache size to use and then let it run. You don't even have to back it up as everything it stores is merely a copy of what's in your repository.

Of course, this release contains some other benefits besides performance. We've added GUI icons for quickly accessing the Project Manager and Workspace Manager dialogs, verified the integration with Visual Studio 2005, allow any single revision to be compared with the workspace revision in the Active History dialog, and added a number of other improvements.

See the SnapshotCM Change List for a complete list of changes.