High Availability of hg web server through NFS share

[Isaac Jurado]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Christophe Furmaniak
<christophe.furmaniak.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to provide high availability of a mercurial "central"
> repository using several (at least 2) apache web servers + hgweb.cgi
> that would serve a shared NFS partition.
>
> Will it work as expected or may I encounter some kind of locks because
> of the shared NFS partition?
>
> Has someone already tried to setup such a configuration?

In general, NFS makes Mercurial perform quite poorly compared to a local
filesystem.  If you search through the mailing list archives you will
find some NFS related discussions.  Also in the wiki the recommendation
is to avoid network filesystems:

    http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/PublishingRepositories

    «generally restricted to intranets, not generally recommended due to
    general issues with network filesystem reliability»

Besides, cosidering that almost all operations are local to a
repository, you must have a whole lot of peers pulling and pushing in
order to need high availability.  And allowing a large group of people
push directly to a central repository is not a good idea either, for
development management reasons.

Cheers.

-- 
Isaac Jurado

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding"
Leonardo da Vinci