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Comment by ryanlitalien | Hacker News Reader

Hi, why the switch? Purely cost? Or admin overhead?

Yes, to both. P4 itself is solid, but it's a very chatty protocol and is very latency sensitive. Running a master in the us, with clients in europe is painful for everyone involved. Replicas and edge servers come with other tradeoffs too.

As a developer, doing things like "I only want this subtree of the stream" is hard. Virtual streams exist, but they have a (non-negligible) overhead on the server. It has some quirks due to it being 30 years old which make it... interesting, to work with sometimes.

Agreed. It's also expensive, and support has been lacking. We'd much prefer something we could maintain and fix ourselves.

Of all the complaints I have about p4, support is actually one I'm ok with. They've pretty consistently helped me fix issues over the years (plenty of which are bugs on their side that they have fixed after I raised it). Their sla is good, and their engineers are usually good at troubleshooting.

They are wildly, wildly expensive though.

That totally depends on where you put value. We're a fraction of other companies licenses for comparison. Also, we have new pricing for our new Helix Core Cloud SaaS product!

Yeah. New pricing, but not cheaper. Don't get me wrong. It's a fine price to pay for a studio going strong. But there is no way I can use it for starting my side-project indie game.

> there is no way I can use it for starting my side-project indie game.

I am not a defender of P4, but for some reason I'm defending them in this thread. It's free for < 5 people [0] if you want a side-project indie game.

[0] https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core/free-version-co...

Yeah, but afaict, not their new cloud service.

Lightweight branching is coming "soon" and will help this exact issue. Contact me for more info.

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