Large SVN checkout fails sporadically

We've been running into this same problem recently. So far I think it has been related to newer subversion clients.

Apache dav_svn_module directive

SVNAllowBulkUpdates Prefer

Seems to help. After adding that into apache conf, no issues have been found. Before that most of the large check outs failed.

I found a discussion thread which explains the problems which are related to subversion clients that are newer than version 1.8.x.See the mailing list thread.

I had the following errors:

Unable to deliver content.  [500, #0]Could not write data to filter.  [500, #175002]

I didn't even use the mod_deflate so that couldn't be it. In my case it turned out to be the authentication (auth_digest_module) causing the error. If a checkout lasts more than 300 seconds, I would have the above error logged in my Apache server log.

The problem is the default AuthDigestNonceLifetime 300 directive. See here. My solution was to set this directive to infinity: AuthDigestNonceLifetime -1

This seems to be an encoding problem of the files according to this post on the subversion maillinglist. You can either look for AddEncoding x-gzip .gz entries in your apache config and remove them or add this to your <Location /svn>…</Location> entry:

RemoveEncoding .gzRemoveEncoding .Z

This was actualy mentioned in the changelog, but neither did I care to read this and learned it the hard way…