[darcs-users] "darcs is slooow."

[Trent W. Buck]

zooko <zooko at zooko.com> writes:

> Today no less than two people said they were considering contributing
> to my open source project -- tahoe -- and both of them were surprised
> at how extremely long it takes to "darcs get http://allmydata.org/
> source/tahoe/trunk tahoe".  Here is the e-mail from the second one,
> who suggests switching to git.
>
> Hopefully darcs-2.3 will address this kind of thing?  :-/

It's a darcs-1 format repository and it has no checkpoints.  This means
that people who only really care about HEAD still have to download all
3k patches individually.  Switching to darcs-2 format, or at least doing
"darcs optimize --checkpoint" would significantly improve get time.

On a broken ADSL2 connection that's getting about ADSL1.5 speeds:

On a laptop where /tmp is a ramdisk, 600MHz Celeron and 768MB of free
memory (1GB total), running Debian Lenny:

  $ darcs --version && time with-temp-dir darcs get http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk
  2.1.0 (release)
  with-temp-dir: entering directory `/tmp/with-temp-dir.xsNewd'
  Finished getting.
  with-temp-dir: leaving directory `/tmp/with-temp-dir.xsNewd'

  real	24m0.642s
  user	7m39.097s
  sys	0m36.542s

On a server where /tmp is ext3, 2.4GHz Celeron, 1GB of free memory (2GB
total), running Fedora Core 3:

  $ ssh soy 'darcs --version && time ~/.bin/with-temp-dir darcs get http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk'
  2.0.2 (release)
  with-temp-dir: entering directory `/tmp/with-temp-dir.e29546'
  Writing inventory 2/2

  darcs: unable to read patch:
  Fri Aug 29 06:21:09 EST 2008  zooko at zooko.com
    * docs: how_to_make_a_tahoe_release.txt
    Just some cryptic notes to self, but if I get hit by a truck then someone else might be able to decode them.
  user error (Failed to download URL http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/_darcs/patches/20080828202109-92b7f-a337f04b737a79a9a67488f5454c06b7595eff71.gz: couldn't connect to server)
  with-temp-dir: leaving directory `/tmp/with-temp-dir.e29546'

  real	29m10.690s
  user	1m31.534s
  sys	0m11.443s
  $