TortoiseSVN file overlay performance - are there any ways of improving it?

By far the biggest performance increase I got was to set the client's Icon Overlays to not process the whole hard drive, only the locations my SVN files live in.

To do this, open the settings (right-click in Explorer->TortoiseSVN->Settings), select Icon Overlays, then in the Exclude paths: enter c:\*

In the Include paths: enter the paths to your Subversion working copy directories (for me all are under c:\subversion\* and c:\workspaces\*)

Use a newline to separate entries (see screenshot)

This made the client seem a thousand times quicker.

This screenshot shows how to exclude c: and d: drives, just including the relevant directories:

You can get some more performance tips from the TortoiseSVN docs.

You could disable TSVNCache.exe altogether. I decided I was willing to live without updated icons if it meant I could open and close Visual Studio orders of magnitude faster.

You could also lower the priority of TSVNCache, which is what my boss did with success. The main problem we were having was startup and shutdown times of Visual Studio, so he wrote a batch file that lowered the priority of the process and then started VS.