White Papers and Presentations

2008 Perforce European User Conference

Perforce Software's 2008 European User Conference was held on April 16 - 17 at the British Library, London, UK.

Experiences with Performance at RIM

by Tim Barrett, RIM

Research in Motion (RIM) completed a 9-month project that resulted in improving the performance of their Perforce installation by more than 10x. The Project team worked with Perforce Technical Support, peer companies, and internal resources to develop and execute a comprehensive project that addressed a variety of infrastructure and application issues. The team surpassed its goal of a 75% improvement in performance and has eliminated previous performance issues. This presentation highlights the major and minor initiatives included in RIM's performance project along with key ways to measure and understand performance.

Demystifying Perforce Backup and Near Real-time Replication

by Richard Baum, Perforce Software, Inc

This presentation starts with examining the basic building blocks of the Perforce checkpoint and journal facility. It then builds on those details as well as other external tools to show how more complex operations can be performed. You'll see how to implement both scheduled and near real-time backup and hot-standby solutions. Also included are examples that will allow users to get a good grasp of what is being discussed.

Perforce and Zero-Configuration Networking

by Michael Bishop, Perforce Software, Inc

This presentation will include a basic discussion of Zero-Configuration Networking, how p4d uses it to advertise servers on the network, and how clients can discover those servers. Details will include how the P4 API is affected, how developers can discover p4d in their own code, Zeroconf best-practices, and juicy miscellaneous details.

Improving Performance at Remote Sites

by Lloyd Cha and Vishnu Mohan, Montalvo Systems

Sharing data across high-latency links remains a significant technical hurdle faced by distributed development teams. The Perforce Proxy provides an efficient and reliable way of caching data for use by developers at distant sites. However, the architecture of the Perforce system requires the central Perforce Server to track the state of all clients, both local and remote. When latency between sites is high, there is a significant cost for exchanging information with the Perforce Server.

In this presentation, the evolution of a system designed to address these shortcomings is described, and the challenges that were faced are discussed. The development of tools to rapidly retrieve data directly from the Perforce Proxy server are also detailed.

Perforce Usage in the Games Industry

by Frank Compagner, Guerrilla Games

Developing state-of-the-art video games has become a very data intensive operation over the last few years, and many game developers are now using Perforce to cope with this. Although game development is superficially not that different from other software development, there are some notable differences: very large head revisions consisting of mostly unmergeable binary data, and the large number of non-technical users on a project. Specific problems caused by these different usage characteristics will be highlighted, and (partial) solutions to these problems will be discussed. Of particular interest will be performance, branching, and tool development.

Large-scale Continuous Integration via Hierarchically Organized Contexts

by Thomas Kroll & Dr. Matthis Langhoff, SAP

The core themes of branching theory and the mainline model are fairly well established. However, there are a great many variations on the theme, as the conventional wisdom is applied to a variety of environments. This presentation helps distill the volumes of branching theory into practical recommendations for a variety of common development environments. Key factors affecting branch structure are discussed, and a set of sample case studies and resulting branch structures will be reviewed.

What's This Flag? Integrating Around Deleted Revisions

by Sam Stafford and Stephanie Turner, Perforce Software, Inc.

When integrations don't work as planned, it can be unclear how to proceed. This hands-on talk demonstrates how to use the authors' favorite Perforce tools to investigate and resolve "tricky" integration scenarios involving deleted and renamed files.

Sorting the Post: An Introduction to the Perforce Broker

by Tony Smith, Perforce Software, Inc.

The Perforce Broker is a new (and currently unsupported) tool in the Perforce Administrator's toolbox. It allows Admins to accept, reject, or redirect commands from users on a variety of criteria. This presentation provides an introduction to the capabilities of the Perforce Broker, and its usage.

Perforce Branching: Moving Fast from Theory to Practical Application

by Tom Tyler, Perforce Software, Inc.

The core themes of branching theory and the Mainline Model are fairly well established. This presentation helps distill the volumes of branching theory into practical recommendations for a variety of common development environments. Key factors affecting branch structure are discussed, and a set of sample case studies and resulting branch structures are reviewed.