I am currently happily using bzr with a 1.2Gb branch through judicious use of shared repositories and switching. Basically, I have one heavy-weight checkout of the 1.2Gb branch in a shared repository, where branches are created with no working trees by default. Then I switch the heavy-weight checkout between "features", before committing to the mainline. The obvious downside is that you can only work on X number of features at the same time (where X is the number of heavy-weight checkouts you have)... though switching this checkout between features is a very rapid operation (~10s on mine roughly). Basic set up is: # Setup the shared bzr repo cd /some/repo/ bzr init-repo --no-trees --default . # Make a clean branch of mainline bzr branch /mainline/bzr/branch mainline # Make a feature to play with bzr branch mainline some-new-feature # Make a checkout to play with bzr co some-new-feature working_1 *hack and play....* *bzr commit etc.* # Make a new feature to play with bzr branch mainline some-other-feature # Switch the heavy workout to the new feature DONT FORGET TO COMMIT FIRST (though bzr won't lose your changes... it's polite that way) cd working_1 bzr switch ..\some-other-feature # Commits will now go to some-other-feature To make this convenient on a day-to-day- basis, I've wrapped up common operations (like creating the branch and then binding the heavy checkout to the new feature branch) up in script files. So to start a new feature, I do "create-feature some-other-feature", and the scripts know my directory layout to take care of the branching etc. Anywho... not sure if that is at all relevant to your use case, but it is working quite well here for ~8devs who have only just migrated from SVN... no data has been accidently lost yet either which is a bonus :). If it is relevant for you, I also have more information about how we mirror our branches onto a shared network repository and other such magics that go to making the setup work well for us. Philip <div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Chris Hecker <<a href="mailto:checker@d6.com">checker@d6.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Ah, sorry, I thought the whole .bzr directory was only 20mb and was confused! Very interested to hear responses! Chris<div><div></div><div class="h5"> On 2010/07/27 21:01, Michael Hope wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> 'bzr revno 4.4' shows 93541 revisions. The mirror .bzr directory is 549 MB. The 4.4 branch directory is 20 MB. The exported size is 559 MB over 63000 files. It's reasonably big. -- Michael On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Chris Hecker<<a href="mailto:checker@d6.com" target="_blank">checker@d6.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> It seems like "large repository" means amount of history? 20mb is not very big at all for the .bzr, I think. How many revisions are there? My repo is 1k revisions, but 55mb, and operations are reasonably fast (creating a new working copy is a little pokey, 1300 files, but not too bad, maybe 10 seconds). I'm very interested in this topic. I have binary files in my repro (maya models and animations, photoshop psds, and audio files), and I'm worried about it blowing up in my face at some point, but so far it's been fine and I'm loving bzr relative to svn. Chris On 2010/07/27 19:40, Michael Hope wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi there. I'm working on the gcc-linaro branch which is stored under bzr and hosted on Launchpad. This is a fairly big branch as it was imported from upstream SVN and contains a large amount of history. Most of the work is day-to-day changes on topic branches. I also want to run a buildbot style program that continually updates and builds the latest. My issue is that the various operations are taking too long. Could anyone suggest tricks or a different work flow to speed things up? Some of the operations include: Creating a mirror branch by doing init-repo, branch lp:gcc-linaro/4.4. The finding revisions stage takes about 10 minutes at 1kB/s. The download stage is much faster. Day-to-day work is done on topic branches. Creating the branch takes 46 s, 250 MB of RAM, and creates a 20 MB .bzr directory. Pushing this branch to LP for merging involves pushing the full 20 MB, but this is acceptable. Doing a bzr pull on the 4.4 mirror directory may more than half an hour and more than 500 MB of memory. Doing a bzr checkout takes over 20 minutes and 800 MB of memory on my fastest machine. On my netbook and ARM board this causes significant swapping. I've yet to complete a checkout on either. I'd also like to share the mirror with other local machines to skip downloading the same 500 MB many times. Running bzr serve and then checking out causes 100 % CPU usage for more than 10 minutes on the host. These numbers were with 2.2b4. 2.2 is significantly better than 2.1. -- Michael </blockquote> </blockquote> </blockquote> </div></div></blockquote></div> -- Philip Peitsch Mob: 0439 810 260