This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Patrick Lenz. Original Post: Weird hanging commits in subversion Feed Title: poocs.net Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/poocsnet Feed Description: Personal weblog about free and open source software, personal development projects and random geek buzz. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Patrick Lenz Latest Posts From poocs.net

When I tried fixing a few broken images on freshmeat today, the commits to my subversion repository would just sit there doing nothing, not even responding to Ctrl-C. I upgraded to the latest subversion release, still no go. When running the command through strace, the following showed up as the latest proof of life:

open(“/dev/random”, O_RDONLY) = 3
read(3,

Sticking this into Google revealed a thread on the Subversion Users list at haxx.se outlining that the problem was supposedly an overused /dev/random. Since I was committing from freshmeat's NFS server, there was very little chance that any other application was using /dev/random actually. There is literally nothing on this box.

Nonetheless I followed the advice from the list to recompile subversion or rather apr with the --with-devrandom=/dev/urandom flags like so:

$ ./configure \
  --prefix=/usr/local/subversion \
  --with-devrandom=/dev/urandom

from the main subversion source code directory. This indeed fixed it! Commits are once again flawlessly being pushed towards the repository.