Getting "resource busy" errors

Question

Whenever I try to commit changes, I am getting a "resource busy" error in SourceTree and the commit rolls back and fails. I'm on a Mac (10.7) using SourceTree 1.2.91 with Mercurial repos. All other features seem to work fine. If I go to the command line, I can commit fine. Also, I'm accessing the source through SMB on a remote system that I have mounted. Any ideas?

stevestreeting · Accepted Answer

It's generally a very bad idea to use SMB mounted repositories, this is not officially supported. SMB is a pretty dumb protocol and doesn't allow for the kind of locking that both git and hg expect to be able to do on the repo to cope with parallel requests etc. Since SourceTree makes heavy use of parallelisation in order to provide a fast user experience, SMB is not supported. I've seen it work, and I haven't seen this error before, but I'm fairly sure this is it. I've also seen SMB hosted repositories get corrupted by git before so I personally wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.

You'd be far better (performance and resilience wise) to use a local repo and push to the remote when you need to, preferably over a more robust protocol like SSH but SMB may be good enough just for the push.