Changelist files limit

Changelists or reviews with many files present a challenge to Swarm; it can take a notable amount of time for the file listing to reach Swarm from the Helix Versioning Engine, and a notable amount of time to provide the file listing HTML to a user's browser. When the file listing is many thousands of files, Swarm may run out of memory. Increasing the amount of memory for Swarm can help, but the Swarm interface may work slowly or not at all depending on the amount of memory available to the user's browser.

With the 2015.1 release, Swarm limits the number of files presented, even if a changelist or review involves more files than the limit.

You can adjust the limit to suit your needs, by specifying a value for max_changelist_files in the SWARM_ROOT/data/config.php file: 

<?php
    'p4' => array(
        'max_changelist_files'  => 1000,
    ),

The default value of 1000 should suffice for most Swarm installations. Consider the effects of changing this value:

  • Problems in the Swarm UI still exist with arbitrarily large values; there is likely no advantage to using a value over 10000.

    Performance will be better with a Helix Versioning Engine 2014.1 or higher, as the file listing will be limited by the Helix Versioning Engine.

  • Smaller values can potentially interfere with reviews and reading changelists; the file limit may cause interesting files in a changelist or review to no longer be displayed in Swarm.