[darcs-users] recent darcs performance progress

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Dear Eric Kow:

Thanks for the news!

On Thursday, 2010-04-15, at 3:13 , Eric Kow wrote:

> I visited http://wiki.darcs.net/Benchmarks and looked at the Tahoe  
> graphs for machines quasar, apricot, vs2 (those that we have graphs  
> for).

It is very cool that darcs has these benchmarks organized. This gives  
me increased hope for future versions of darcs. As always with  
benchmarks, it is hard to summarize the results in a readable way.  
Perhaps the software that produced this site could help: http:// 
speed.pypy.org .

Anyway, I see that darcs-2.4.0 with optimized repo *does* have  
significantly better performance for some operations on some  
machines. I guess if any of the Tahoe-LAFS contributors complain to  
me about darcs performance I will suggest to them that try upgrading  
to darcs-2.4.1 and running optimize and see if that helps.

> Have a look at http://wiki.darcs.net/Releases/2.4 as well.  You may  
> find some of the new features (eg. the interactive hunk editor, -- 
> skip-conflicts) to be compelling enough for an upgrade.

Unfortunately the release notes don't explain what "--skip-conflicts"  
is, so I didn't pay attention to it until now. Maybe in the future we  
could write more meaningful summaries of the new features in the  
release notes. Anyway, having seen the issue number in the release  
notes and then hunted up that issue on bugs.darcs.net, that looks  
like a useful feature.

> Petr has work in orbit <http://bugs.darcs.net/patch156> which will  
> complete the arc started by his summer of code project.  The hashed- 
> storage stuff was a big chunk of work and it looks like we still  
> need this finishing blow to fully benefit from it.

Can you give some indication of what affect this is likely to have  
from the perspective of an end-user?

> He also has another patch <http://bugs.darcs.net/patch196> (porting  
> David's work over to HEAD) which fixes an issue scaling with  
> respect to the number of patches in your history.

And this one -- can you explain what is the effect of this issue? Is  
it something that one can see in the Tahoe-LAFS repository or does it  
need more patches in your history to have a noticeable effect?

Thanks!

Regards,

Zooko