What’s new in P4 Server 2023.2

Released: November 2023

For a complete list of what’s new in this release, see the Release notes and What’s new in P4 administration in the P4 Server Administration Documentation.

Configuration comments

p4 configure now supports comments, which can be used to track the reason why a configurable setting was changed. In addition, detailed information about each configurable is displayed with the p4 configure help command.

Streams

p4 streams--viewmatch now accepts a revision specifier.

Attributes

To help mitigate performance problems with creating and restoring checkpoints with large database tables, this release provides a feature to specify the type of storage for new "attributes", also known as "traits". Attributes that have. large values can be stored in the trait depot instead of in the db.traits table. The trait depot is a new type of depot that is created automatically and is used exclusively for managing trait values.

To specify the minimum size of traits that are stored in the trait depot, set the trait.storagedepot.min configurable.

The trait depot is visible by using the p4 depots -t trait command.

To avoid the risk of trait values being lost in the event of a disk failure, include the trait depot in the list of depots that require regular backups.

For more information, see p4 attribute.

Various

  • The p4 fstat command has a new option, -On, to report attributes with their storage location rather than their values.

  • The new zlib.compression.level configurable specifies the amount of compression, with can be tuned to balance compression time and file size.

  • Setting up rules for which files to exclude from p4 add and p4 reconcile no longer requires setting the P4IGNORE environment variable. Just create a file named .p4ignore or p4ignore.txt and add your rules to that file.

  • The proxy.clearcachethresh configurable allows you to set the threshold for deleting inactive files from the proxy cache.

  • The -L option of the p4 license command lists the server IP and MAC addresses to use when requesting a license from Perforce Support.

  • The new journalPrefixBackup commit server configurable makes it possible to manually move rotated journal files to a secondary storage location on the commit server and still support edge server activity. For example, your commit server machine might have access to a location where storage is more economical. Setting this configurable enables the commit server to read the rotated journal files from the secondary location. No server shutdown is necessary to set the configurable.

See also What's New in P4 Server Administration Documentation.