Latency leading to very very long pull times

[Aaron Bentley]

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Andrew King wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Thanks for all the great work with bzr.
> Now to the wishlist :)
> 
> I know there is a lot of work being done on performance, and I have
> searched the lists in particular for "latency" and seen that it can
> cause bad performance.
> 
> Unfortunately, I am now in the situation where a pull across a remote
> link (350ms latency WAN) can take 20-30 minutes. (A fresh branch takes
> hours).
> So, some questions:
> 1. Is this fixable, or is it a characteristic of the bzr model or data
> structures?

This is fixable.  There are two parallel efforts:
1. the smart server
2. container-based repositories

> 2. If it is fixable, is there any kind of time line?

Not a fixed one, but I'd be surprised if we didn't have Smart Server
improvements within a month

> 3. Is this to do with the total size of the repository, or the number
> of revisions that have changed, or both?

The greatest effect on latency would be the number of files.  However,
the size of the repository and inventory indices can cause
bandwidth-limiting.

> 5780 revisions
> 103388 KiB in repo.

This is about twice the size of Bazaar, both in revision count and in
repository size.

One thing you could try is using merge directives instead of a branch.
Since they're single files, they shouldn't take as long to download.

Aaron
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