Given that the size of ooo-site is around 9GB, there are some unique challenges here in dealing with the CMS. For the most part tho, the typical workflow of editing a few pages on the site, committing them, and publishing them can all be done reasonably effectively using the CMS website.
OTOH, people who need to monkey with templates/** or lib/** files will trigger full site builds and their changes may materially impact every file on the site. While I've now reduced the build time to around 4 minutes, the bottleneck now remains squarely in the time it takes svn to commit back those changes and to deal with merging those changes during publication requests. In those circumstances I strongly advise you to use the publish.pl script on people.apache.org to review and if ok publish your changes. This will eliminate the chances that your browser times out a direct publish request to the CMS site, which is a real hassle given that it takes ~15 minutes for a largeish publish request to be processed. In the near future we will be upgrading svn to 1.7 on the CMS server which will bring in better performance along with full support for deletions via svn, but I don't expect the performance changes to significantly alter the workflow I'm recommending here. And please for the sake of others who want to work on minor changes to the site, don't make a sledgehammer type commit without following up with an eventual publish request, because publish requests are an all-or-nothing type deal. That means a sledgehammer commit will cause unreasonable delays for people who are trying to publish minor changes to the site, until the person who did the sledgehammer commit follows thru and publishes everything. HTH
