Greetings from London

[Lars Wirzenius]

On to, 2007-05-17 at 16:52 +0100, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> Rightly or wrongly, performance on huge projects affects the number of
> small projects that switch over to Bazaar.  One reason is that Bazaar's
> advantages (i.e. usability) are harder to measure than raw performance
> numbers.  Another is that large projects, which do care about
> performance, are often opinion leaders.  In any case, it seems like to
> be really successful, Bazaar must have performance that is at least
> comparable to its competitors.

As it happens, I used a server I had idle for a few days to run a few
tests, namely, unpacking all Debian etch source packages and importing
the resulting directory tree into bzr, git, and svn. Neither bzr nor git
managed to do it. I killed bzr after about 24 hours, since it was not
finished yet ("bzr add"), and it seemed to need more active memory than
the gigabyte the server has. Linux's out-of-memory killer got git. svn
managed to succeed ("svn import"), after 2502 minutes of real time (117
minutes user, 34 minutes system).

This is just a data point. It is obviously stupid to try to have such a
big, monolithic project, but of course, it'd be nice if bzr could do it.

Apart from size problems, both bzr and svn had trouble with some
filenames, specifically non-utf8 ones. svn also had trouble with some
files (fifos, I think). As it happens, from my point of view the
insistence of bzr on well-formed filenames is a bigger problem than any
speed issues. I'd really like to be able to import any old free software
project out there, even if it means someone on, say, Windows couldn't
(immediately) check out the repository.

Unfortunately, I didn't keep good notes of this experiment. I've
attached the script to create the etch source tree, in case someone
wants re-do the experiment.

-- 
i++; /* TODO: make this pre-increment - more efficient */
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