Bazaar-NG vs. Mercurial -- speed comparison

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

>
> mercurial uses a python extension (C code) to do diff & patch. Which can
> certainly be a bottleneck (though I'm thinking bzr's might be using XML,
> and certainly used to be how it handled weaves). I should revisit my
> performance testing with knits. Mercurial has used 'revfiles' for a long
> time, which are very similar to knits.
> We might consider looking into using a similar diff & patch, though it
> would mean requiring some sort of build stage for bzr. Right now it is
> very nice that bzr just works from the source tree. (Also, on one of my
> production servers, I don't install gcc, which makes mercurial difficult
> to install, and it is where I host some repositories)

Could a mixed approache be made available? If you have a C compiler,
do this, if you don't do that? After all many linux users do have gcc
in their systems or else gcc is simple enough to install from the
binary packs for the different distros. Even windows users, I think,
might be able to compile or download precompiled extensions from using
Mingw (I think I recall that mingw was not a huge pain).  The gains in
speed might make it worth it. And bzr would still work from the source
(it just wouldn't use the compiled C).


> Now, I admit to a little bit of cheating, in that I didn't create
> working trees here. This does have relevance when you have public

Yes, but isn't this cheating quite a bit of cheating, specially if you
want to do the cloning for local repos to be able to hack at a bunch
of files and test this crazy idea?


>
> So I think hg definitely does have a lot of things we should look
> closely at. But I did want to make people aware that hg isn't 30x faster
> than bzr. In many cases it is more in the 4-7x range.


Thanks for the analyses; certainly using bzr with the bazaar repo. and
hg with the hg repo. did not seem fair. 4-7x range agrees more with my
informal experiences.


R.

-- 
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Bioinformatics Unit
Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
http://ligarto.org/rdiaz