Bazaar NG performance on large repositories

[Nicholas Allen]

Hi,

I thought that you might be interested in some performance tests that I 
performed using bzr after I converted a small part of our svn repository 
to a bzr one. The bzr repository contains about 20,000 revisions and is 
about 500 MB in size. Some operations are fast while others seem to take 
rather a long time. I created 2 shared repositiories - one with trees 
and one without.

bzr branch trunk my-branch
without trees: ~3 seconds
with trees: 3 mins 58 seconds

So creating the working tree seems to take quite a long while. Branching 
in a shared repository without trees is lightning fast though!

bzr log some-file
This command took a very long time. In fact, I gave up waiting for it to 
complete. No output was seen on the terminal at all - even after 5 
minutes. I think in its current state this would be completely unusable 
for us. I hope that bzr will see some performance improvements here.

bzr log
This command was fast and output was almost instant on the terminal.

bzr blame some-file
This command was very fast - no problems here!

bzr status
This command took about 2 minutes to complete. It also claimed that all 
files were modified but I had only modified one file.

bzr diff
Took about 30 seconds to complete. It claimed all files had 
modifications "(properties changed)" but there were no code changes 
except the file I modified. What could these property changes be? Is 
this a possible bug?

bzr ci -m "Some message"
Due to the property changes every file needed to be checked in which 
took about 1 minute.
After checking in the property changes and modifying 1 file again this 
only took about 10 seconds.

bzr push
This command took about a minute even though I only added one line to 
one file and checked in. This was only a problem when pushing to a 
branch that had trees so this was probably caused by the need to update 
the working tree which takes a long time.

So I think before we can consider moving to bzr (which I hope we will do 
at some point) building the working tree would need to be faster and the 
log of a single file would have to be a lot faster. I know there has 
been a lot of improvement in the last few releases so hopefully these 
problems will not exist for much longer.

Thanks,

Nicholas Allen