[darcs-devel] [Haskell-cafe] Re: announcing darcs 2.0.0pre2

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 12:29:20PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> David Roundy wrote:
> >I am pleased to announce the availability of the second prerelease of darcs
> >two, darcs 2.0.0pre2.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Continuing my performance tests, I tried unpulling and re-pulling a bunch 
> of patches in a GHC tree.  I'm unpulling about 400 patches using 
> --from-tag, and then pulling them again from a local repo.  Summary: darcs2 
> is about 10x slower than darcs1 on unpull, and on pull it is 100x slower in 
> user time but only 20x slower in elapsed time.

I'm not seeing this behavior right now, but am unsure whether it's because
of something in my testing, or if I've improved something.  I definitely
fixed a problem in the no-patches-to-pull case, where we were unnecessarily
reading the entire repository because of inadequate laziness.

Another possibility is that the problem is one that shows up because of the
way the repositories were generated.  Incidentally, I *think* that with the
latest convert, optimize should be a noop, and if it's not, I'd be
interested to hear (but haven't gotten around to testing...).  I suspect
that if you perform the same sequence in the reverse direction (unpull and
repull, but running the commands in the other repository), then you'll see
much better performance.  My suspicion is that the trouble is that optimize
only optimizes for changes since the last tag, so by unpulling this many
patches you're going back into "unoptimized" territory.  I'm toying with
making optimize do a "deep" optimize, but then it'll always be O(N^2),
which is a little scary.  On the other hand, since we now auto-optimize,
making the real thing more expensive shouldn't hurt as much (since it'll
not be needed very often).

Anyhow, could you retry this test with the above change in methodology, and
let me know if (a) the pull is still slow the first time and (b) if it's
much faster the second time (after the reverse unpull/pull)?

Thanks!

David (who is doing darcs hacking in the morning, before the other grownups
wake up)