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but for what it’s worth, give each client a unique SVN repo ... it’s their site right?

how much space do you need for the typical web site? even a large web site? unfuddle gives me 200MB and i’ve been using it for a month on revision 36 and i’m using just over 4MB of the 200MB.

How much space you need depends on the size of your project and what you will be keeping under revision control.  If you are storing large binary files then the size of your repo could balloon.  That being said, in most cases your repo shouldn’t take up a lot of space.

All you really need to get started with SVN is SVN.  If you want to access with svnserve you will need to fire the daemon, but if you use svn+ssh (which you should), you can leave the daemon off, as it will be started automatically on each request.  If you want to set up webdav, you will need to make sure Apache is set up and should have mod_dav_svn and mod_authz_svn installed.  If you are using another web server, you should check out the manual to see what needs to be done.  I know for a fact that the Nginx webdav module isn’t really ready to roll, so if you use Nginx and want svn over webdav you will need to proxy to Apache.  I don’t know about Lighttpd.

As far as your repo/project structure, that is up to you.  It is easier to work with a single repository with multiple projects, but if a lot of different users need access, you will have to configure all of the acl stuff which could quickly become a pita.  Multiple repos are fine too, but it just means more overhead when doing things like backups and sharing code between projects.  Your choice.

i guess my question is whether or not it’s resource intensive in general. cpu, memory ... not just space.

No. Not at all. A SVN repo is just a file system that sits on your drive.  Accessing through svnserve or webdav requires very minimal overhead.