RFC: startup time - again

[Adrian Wilkins]

> From: Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net>

> You about walkdirs_win32? I don't found it's too superior for my usage.
> Less than 2x speed-up on my trees with my CPU and my hard drive.

2x speed up is not to be sneezed at! The speedup is possibly rather more
noticeable on my project because it deals with trees with over 4600
paths in, and I certainly get much, much better speed out of status and
commit.

> 
>> On 1.6, it totally blows [SVN] away.
>
> Nice argument, but bzr's competitor is git/hg in first place.

Hg didn't work for me because of it's escaping of capitals in metadata,
and at the time, you had to find your own merge tool ; much less fun on
Windows.

Competing with git on raw performance is daft. The design of git was
optimized to be good at merging a very large number of kernel patches,
because that's what Linus does. Other considerations in it's design were
secondary, and it shows. My userbase would never have grokked the
default porcelain in git, so for them, git would have been a lot slower
than Bazaar.

> Many people happy with centralized model of svn.
>

Part of my point is that if you are happy with the work model of SVN,
Bazaar can reproduce it and still kick it into the gutter as far as
performance goes - never mind that it's not as fast as git. On Windows,
the competition for Bazaar is VSS, TFS, CVS, Perforce, ClearCase, and SVN.

> There is enough C code in bzrlib to make you scream. :-)

Probably, but because it's kept tight and focussed and working I don't
care about it ; I care about feature code, not function code.

>> ---- thoughts about the Windows version
>>
>>> under Windows it is about 500ms.
> 
> What is this number on your machine? With python version/bzr.exe?
> I think there is room for improvements.
> 

bzr rocks --no-plugins 300ms
bzr st --no-plugins 420ms  # empty tree, zero revs

This is a Core Duo 2.4Ghz laptop with 2GB of RAM and a virus checker. I
don't have the .exe version. Measured using measure-command on Powershell.

I don't have the .exe version. I'd imagine it's faster to load ; I don't
care much because being able to slip into my bzrlib folder and quickly
test something is cavalier, but useful.