This post discusses an issue I had with Atlassian’s SourceTree software and my firewall. I originally thought that SourceTree was just slow and didn’t work well on Windows, but I recently found out it was actually my anti-virus / firewall that was causing the issues.

Atlassian—Use ‘Em

First, I’m going to step back a bit because I think the Atlassian suite of products is fantastic and I want to share it. 🙂 I started using them back in January of this year for my development projects. The company I was working at had a small development team (under 10 users). Their pricing scheme is $10 for the first 10 users of a product and that meant that we could use just about all of their software for under $100! Great for small teams and projects. We used JIRA extensively and intended to move from our SVN repos to a git system based on the “git-flow” branching model.

The Problem

This ultimately led me to SourceTree. I’ve used git for a long time at home, but mainly through the git bash console on Windows. I tried SourceTree when I first started using the Atlassian products, but it was unbearably slow. It would freeze for several seconds while doing the most basic things (i.e. viewing a diff, staging a file, switching between the branch view and working copy, and so on). I had originally assumed that this was just an issue with the product and decided to check in at a later date.

Well, I came across this post again recently and decided I would load up SourceTree and see if anything had changed.

Nope.

“Ok, so it’s still slow. That sucks. Maybe I’ll just try it out anyways…”

So, I started using it with git-flow on some of the projects I’m working on. I also started using Stash as a central place to manage my git repositories. Naturally, it works well with SourceTree since they’re both Atlassian products. Great! If only SourceTree wasn’t so slow….

Slow SourceTree: The Fix

Ok, so I had Stash and SourceTree installed on the same computer and they were working fine and talking to one another. I wanted to add my laptop to the mix so I could work on the go. I installed SourceTree and attempted to connect it to Stash. No dice. My firewall, Comodo, was blocking it despite the fact that I had set up rules for the port and the program itself. I spent an hour tweaking the settings and decided that, if it wasn’t going to let me use my programs or give me a way of troubleshooting why it was blocking it, I wasn’t going to use it anymore. I’ve used Comodo for years and even after their last major update (which was a step back, in my opinion), I stuck with them.

So, I went on the hunt for a new Firewall and found Privatefirewall which seemed promising, but caused my computer to freeze on boot. I then settled on Online Armor. It doesn’t have the full-featured anti-virus that Comodo has but it’s simple, efficient, and, most importantly, it works!

New firewall. Check! External connections to Stash. Check! And, lo-and-behold, SourceTree is no longer slow! I don’t know if it had something to do with how Comodo was scanning it with the AV or something related to the broken firewall, but now it works and works fast.

I thought I’d share this since I know many other users are experiencing slow-downs with SourceTree. A quick Google search for “sourcetree slow windows” finds six questions on the Atlassian Q&A site. All of which were not helpful for me.

Are you experiencing it going slowly? Did this help? Did you do something else that made it faster? Drop a comment and let me know.