I recently upgraded my Subversion client from version 1.7.5 to 1.8.3 and from that time on I experience hangs when executing multiple 'svn log' commands in a short amount of time. The "hanging" svn process consumes all CPU cycles it gets but never finishes.
I can reproduce the problem using the following shell script (on Windows using Cygwin):
#!/bin/bash
ROOT="http://example.com/svn/trunk"
for DIR in $(svn ls "${ROOT}" | head -n 4); do
svn log -v -l 5 "${ROOT}/${DIR}" 2>&1 | head -n 100 > /dev/null
done
In my environment I need at least 4 svn processes to achieve the faulty behavior. The hang only occurs if the output is truncated using the head command (but it can be redirected to a normal file instead of /dev/null which then contains the expected log messages).