Visual SVN Operations Fail to Connect 90% of the Time Due to a Connection Being "...forcibly closed by the remote host"

I am running Visual SVN Server version 3.6.0 on Windows Server 2012 Standard (64-bit).

About 10% of the time that I try to do a commit/update on a repository, it works perfectly fine. The other 90% of the time, the commit/update tries for about 30 seconds, then times out with the following error message:

Error: Commit failed (details follow):
Error: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'https://xxx.xx.xx.xxx:8443/svn/my_project/js'
Error: Error running context: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
Completed!:

Even stranger is that, once I get a commit/update to complete successfully (by simply trying over and over again), I then have a brief window of time where all of my commits/updates will work successfully. Then eventually it will go back to failing for a while until it decides to work again.

I see a lot of threads mentioning the same error message "An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host", but none of them seem to be experiencing this particular issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Solution

You mentioned two symptoms that point to problems with

broken antivirus on client and server side,
firewall or proxy.

I can't tell what exactly is causing the error An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host in your case. However, the wording of the error should be pretty accurate -- something is causing the connection to close.

I see a lot of threads mentioning the same error message "An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host", but none of them seem to be experiencing this particular issue.

I guess that most of the threads you see regarding this error are confusing. A user can receive this particular error when he enters invalid URL to the repository (http vs. https). Your case is different -- you receive this error in the middle of running operation.