bzr memory usage

[Eric Siegerman]

On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 20:26 -0400, John Szakmeister wrote:
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Eric Siegerman <lists08-bzr at davor.org>
wrote:
> > Actually, I know that -- absent your memory restrictions -- the
> > performance is fine on subsequent operations (there was a thread [1]
> > about this not too long ago re. emacs); I'd be curious to learn
> > whether the memory footprint also becomes acceptable.
> 
> ...until the repository gets re-packed.  That tends to be a fairly
> memory hungry operation too.

True.

Dimitrios: you said you only want "to run just a few bzr
commands" on the resource-constrained machine.  Will a
lightweight checkout on that machine suffice for your needs?

If so:
  - Copy only a lightweight checkout over to the
    memory-constrained machine (not a heavy checkout or branch),
    and
  - Connect it to its (remote) branch via a smart protocol

That way, packing will happen on the server, which presumably
isn't nearly as resource-constrained.


If the above won't work for you, then *before* you tar up your
branch and copy it across, cd into it and run:
    bzr pack --clean-obsolete-packs
    
That way, it'll be a long time before any huge, memory-chewing
"pack" operations have to run.  (Much-smaller "pack" operations
will still occur, but hopefully they'll be small enough to run in
reasonable time on your resource-constrained box.)

  - Eric