[darcs-users] Darcs performance observations

John Goerzen jgoerzen at complete.org
Thu Apr 28 13:36:50 UTC 2005


Hi,

I'd like to share some observations of darcs performance I've
accumulated over the course of converting the 21,000-changeset fptools
to darcs.

 * "Frequent" operations such as record, whatsnew, revert, push, pull,
   changes, etc. seem to be fairly fast.  Most continue to complete in
   less than 5 seconds, which is about where I'd expect them to be on
   smaller repos.  I obvserved no noticable slowdown of darcs record
   during the entire conversion process.

 * The initial "get" is painful.  Even with --partial, it uses 300MB+ of
   RAM and takes a minute or two to process after it's got the
   checkpoint.

 * The biggest surprise to me was the extreme slowness of darcs tag
   --checkpoint.  I would have expected this to be speedy, since there
   is already a pristine tree in _darcs/current.  But it seems like it
   tries to go through the entire history.  I killed my darcs 1.0.2
   process after it had chewed through almost 60 minutes of CPU time
   without producing any output.  darcs-unstable was noticably faster on
   this, but still took 5-10 mins if memory serves.

-- John






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