Bazaar-NG vs. Mercurial -- speed comparison

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On 5/18/06, Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> wrote:

> Sure, but more data can also mean less reading at other points.  For
> example, if knits didn't have snapshots, they'd have less data and more
> reading would be required to construct an individual version.

Right. This is the tradeoff we make, too. For example, we have
snapshots, as already mentioned. But in addition, we store a diff as a
diff against the tip revision of a file, not against its parent
revision. This usually makes the diff bigger, but we don't have to
seek back to the parent in order to reconstruct that part of the file.
We trade off file size against seek probability there, which has
proven to be a win for performance. Diffing against the parent had a
noticeable penalty for us when Chris Mason measured it.