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rffn

Perforce does what is requested in the article:

- Working with large files

- Getting only the needed files form the sever, not all

- Not wasting space with .svn/.git copies of the files

- Reasonably fast.

They have quite some customers in the video game industry because of their support for huge projects and large files. We are using it for a different kind of application with similar requirements (100000s files, size up to GBs range per file). Perforce is well suited for the job and has good 24/7 support.

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Is there a reasonable hosted option for Perforce? A quick search turned up Assembla[1]; I haven't heard of them, so I don't know how reputable they are.

GitHub has just become so ubiquitous, you start to forget other source control systems are out there. If I wasn't still using SVN at work, I'd be in git all the time.

[1] https://www.assembla.com/repositories/perforce

They are advertising for a while to offer a hosted service themselves: https://www.perforce.com/helix-ondemand

I did not try this though.

Assembla indeed offers hosted Perforce, (and hosted Git, and hosted Subversion, and even all three in the same workspace) but only as part of their collaboration suite. To get your money's worth, you'd also have to buy into their wiki and ticketing system (which does integrate into whatever repository you choose) and planning tools.

Which aren't bad, but may not be what you're looking for.

Aside from what was mentioned, you can also self-host perforce at a relatively low cost (provided you don't need more than 20 users, as that's all perforce's free license supports).

I personally host a perforce server on google compute engine for around $15 a month (g1-small + whatever size persistent disk you want). Relatively easy to set up (they provide repositories for ubuntu and fedora iirc), configuration is largely interactive when setting up or through the P4Admin tool (which allows you to very easily setup permissions, depots, etc).

I know that isn't fully managed like github and doesn't provide issue tracking, wikis, etc, but I've found it fairly easy to deal with if you know a bit of how to setup a linux VPS.

Git Fusion is worth a checkout for those programmers who want Git with a mixed repo. Only discovered it this week, but it allows me to pull from a Perforce repo as a git origin :)

Yup, perforce is the de-facto solution to this. We had a similar setup where the art-sync was ~600GB(once again views are fantastic for keeping on-disk repo size down).

I haven't had a chance to use git-fusion "in anger" yet, but I hear lots of good things for treating a p4 like a git endpoint to allow devs to work in a DVCS manner while keeping all the good parts of Perforce.

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