p4d

p4d is the Perforce server daemon, the central component of Perforce's Helix Core version control system. It runs as a background service on a server and handles client requests for versioned files, including standard operations such as syncing, submitting changelists, branching, merging, and labeling. Clients interact with p4d using the Perforce protocol via the p4 command line client or IDE integrations.

Deployment and storage: The server stores its data in a designated root directory known as P4ROOT. Within this root, Perforce maintains a database of metadata (the db.* files) along with a transaction log (journal and checkpoint files) and the actual content of versioned files in its depot. The server can host multiple depots and supports various workspace and stream configurations.

Starting and configuring: p4d is started with a root directory and a port, for example p4d -r /path/to/p4root -p 1666. It can run as a foreground or background process (with -d on Unix-like systems to run as a daemon). In Windows, it can run as a service. Security is managed via a protections table, user authentication, and optional TLS/SSL; administrator can enable TLS and configure access rules.

Administration and backup: Operations include creating backups through periodic checkpointing and journal archiving; restoring from a checkpoint/journal pair is possible. Regular backups are essential for disaster recovery. Performance tuning and scaling may involve hardware resources, network configuration, and, in larger deployments, a multi-server topology with replica servers.

History and context: p4d is part of Perforce's version control platform, now marketed as Helix Core. It is widely used in large codebases requiring high performance and fine-grained access control. The term p4d is sometimes used to refer to the server as a whole.