[darcs-users] Re: Darcs-server : slow

[tnorth at bluewin.ch]

Helloo,

>Yeah, it's probably around what one would expect.  Darcs isn't optimized
>for finding out information about a given patch.  Depending on your disk
>speed vs processor speed, I imagine it could be either faster or slower
if
>you turned off compression.  It's worth experimenting.

Ok. Seems strange to me, but let's keep it like that, i'll use diff instead.

>Binary files are particularly painful, since darcs is pretty slow at
>parsing them, which may be part of why your repository is slow.  This is
>an
>area where I think darcs could be sped up, but few enough people keep
>binaries under darcs that it's probably not the most important performance
>area to work on.

Ok. There was someone here using darcs for web projects too. Do you use darcs
cgi as well ?

>That would be another difference.  The darcs repository is run on a machine
>with four 2.4GHz xeons--of course, this is a virtual machine, but it's
>still pretty darn fast.  And there's still a noticeable delay when you run
>an annotate, and I can see (on top) the darcs processes when people do run
>annotate.

Aha I see :)

>Darcs just isn't optimized for file-specific access.  We could add a cache
>of just the portions of patches corresponding to specific files, but that
>would again be a lot of work to solve a problem that only affects the
>largest repositories.  And it wouldn't help with any of the "non-query"
>commands, pull, get, etc.  So for the moment, I'd say simply speeding up
>patch parsing would be more worthwhile, as that would benefit more darcs
>commands.  For example, it would be nice if the lazy parser were able to
>skim quickly over the contents of patches to files, so they needn't be
>parsed unless we actually want to examine that file.  But so far the lazy
>parser isn't even ever used (because I haven't had the time/interest to
>benchmark and make sure it improved things--that is memory or time
>behavior).

Ok. Nothing simple now to do that... Anyway, I keep darcs and we'll see later
if something is changing :)

Thanks you very much,
T.North