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Comment by dev360 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like perforce is common when there are lots of binary files - is this mostly due to storage concerns?

Bunch of factors:

  - Really good binary performance(light years ahead of git).
  - Proper locking for files that can't be merged(basically everything in the art dir).
  - Proxy support for co-located teams.

Game repos can easily approach multiple TB just for the art assets. In that area Perforce is once of the few VCS that scales appropriately.

+1. Also easy graphical interface - P4Win/P4V, and easy to understand the system of changelists. It also helps that older changelists mean things submitted in the past, newer in the future - e.g. in contrast with digest/fingerprint schemes like other systems use.

Yup forgot about that but a good point as well.

Yes, perforce is really good with large binary files. Only recently Git LFS allowed for git repositories to store large binaries as well.

We use git with lfs for our game. It has on occasion been a bit of a pain, however perforce is too...unfortunately there isn't a really great solution atm, just a bunch of more or less flawed ones.

Can you comment on the problems you ran into with LFS?

sometimes it/git would mess up for unknown reasons and people will get the text file with a pointer to the lfs-hosted asset instead of the asset itself.

Also it's very slow for small files, and the filtering is according to file extension.

So e.g. if I have some massive mp3s for (sometimes many minutes of) music but also many (100s-1000s) small ones for sound effects downloading 1000 small mp3s take a couple seconds per file even if each is only ~40kb big (normally download rate is a couple MB/sec).

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