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Proxy Server Localizes Perforce SCM Software


New remote server reduces WAN bandwidth, improves response time for file revisions

By Alan Zeichick
January 1, 2003 — 
With the latest version of its eponymous software configuration management software, Perforce Software Inc. has added a proxy server that caches file revisions and artifacts being read from a headquarters server by remote site developers. Subsequent references to those files or artifacts will then be served from the local cache, rather than retrieved over the slower wide-area network link.

The benefit to this feature in Perforce 2002.2, according to president and CTO Chris Seiwald, is that the proxy not only speeds up response time, but also reduces WAN utilization and can lower the processor workload of the organization's primary SCM server.

While Seiwald admitted that Perforce (www.perforce.com) isn't the first SCM vendor to add a remote-user proxy to its tool, he argued that competing solutions are much more expensive.

As an example, he cited MKS Inc.'s "federated server architecture" for its Source Integrity Enterprise Edition (SIEE), which shipped in September 2002. That solution requires a fully licensed US$8,000 SIEE server in each remote location, as well as a US$2,000 per-site add-on component.

By contrast, said Seiwald, Perforce still requires only a single SCM server to serve as the repository, and does not require that one be installed in the remote locations. For those sites, the company offers the proxy software, called P4P, at no extra cost. Perforce's software is priced per seat, at US$750 per developer; the 2002.2 version began shipping at the end of December.

Another difference is that Perforce's software is a passive cache; it stores files or other artifacts only after they have been requested by a remote user, so only the second and subsequent requestors of an SCM element will see the reduced retrieval time. Changes to the central SCM repository are not actively pushed out to the remote sites in anticipation of their use, or pre-fetched by the P4P cache software. With MKS' federated architecture, the remote cache is an active element that is kept synchronized with the main SCM repository; therefore, the first requestor of an artifact would often find the item already in the remote cache. Perforce is working on developing that functionality, according to Seiwald.


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