Vault: A bit slow?
I hate to be the only one with a negative post regarding SourceGear's Vault, but here goes...
About a year ago I first came across the Vault product from SourceGear. I had been looking at their SourceOffsite product, and their site had information regarding their upcoming VSS replacement product. We were using VSS at the time, and desperately needed something that worked better over remote connections. Even with cable/dsl modems, VSS just wasn't cutting it. Unfortunately, Vault wasn't quite ready when we made a decision and we wound up going with QSC's Team Coherence (which, by they way, is certainly a good system and has met most of our needs, not to mention QSC's excellent customer support). Like many posting on their blogs recently, I decided to take another look at Vault. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how I could deal with it on a regular basis.
After installing the system entirely on my dev workstation - a beefy desktop that already had IIS and SQL Server setup and working - I proceeded to add a small project into Vault as a test. This project was made up of no more than 20 files, all of which were less than 5KB in size. The process was slow. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't unbearable or anything. However, it was without a doubt slower than any other source control system I had ever used. Checking out a single file followed by an immediate check-in also felt slow. I assume this is attributed to the design: the GUI passes the file off to a web-service (which, in my opinion, is always a relatively sluggish technology) running in IIS, which then passes it off to the SQL database. I felt fairly confident that performance would not degrade in a remote scenario, though I did not test this. However, am I really willing to deal with a system that feels "sluggish" during 85% of the time I use it (in the office) just to have decent performance the other 15% of the time (remote)? I don't think so.
So...I'll stick with Team Coherence, which was designed to work over TCP/IP and thus performs very well in remote scenarios (and, btw, costs less), hope they add the features I'm missing soon enough, and resign myself to not using the "latest-and-greatest" built on the platform I build my own systems upon, using the same tools I use myself. I wanted to like it - I really, really did.