So what if I want to upgrade the SVNKIT on my remote agents?

[Gretchen]

So what if I want to upgrade the SVNKIT on my remote agents so that it matches the version on my server? We are having dog-slowness in bamboo repository checkouts versus SVN client checkouts against the same repo. The hope would be that upgrading the svnkit to match the one upgraded on the server would magically mend the situation. As I am fresh out of pixie dust this is the remaining choice.

Can I just replace the svnkit<.version.>jar file and restart the agent to upgrade it? Or is there a different procedure to accomplish the same.

[Gretchen · Accepted solution]

It turned out that this (SVN checkout slowness) was related to using a non-standard JDK (IBM's) when running the bamboo remote-agent. During a completely unrelated upgrade we discovered that (when the new 5.1.1 remote-agents suddenly wouldn't work at all with the IBM JDK) by pointing to a sun JDK everything suddenly worked normally. Note: the change required was to the wrapper.conf on the remote-agent server and included modifications to add the JAVA_HOME and the specific java.exe that we wanted to use. I'll include the syntax here because the documentation was not clear on this point.

# Java Application
set.JAVA_HOME=C:\Progra~1\Java\jdk1.7.0_17
wrapper.java.command=C:\Progra~1\Java\jdk1.7.0_17\bin\java.exe

This resolved our problem with the remote agent and the bonus of speeding up checkouts from SVN (probably related to svnkit not liking IBM - can't really blame them for that). Note that we also had to use keytool and import the cacert entry for the host Bamboo server into the C:\Progra~1\Java\jdk1.7.0_17\jre\security\cacert file in order for ssl to work properly. So if you change your JDK you must reimport to the related jre cert.

There were so many hits on the related question that I thought it would be useful to put the answer here as well.