Re: What have the Romans done for us? (Bazaar)

[Óscar Fuentes]

Karl Fogel <address@hidden> writes:

[snip]

>> bzr log is so slow (40 seconds) as
>>to be only somewhat useful.  
>
> Hmm.  On my 4-year-old IBM ThinkPad R60 running Debian GNU/Linux:
>
>   $ time bzr log -n0 --show-ids > log-n0.out
>   real    0m25.147s
>   user    0m23.173s
>   sys     0m1.540s
>   $ 
>
> That's for the entire history of the project.  I don't have a CVS tree
> handy to test with, but my memory is CVS was not faster at that
> operation -- though of course, CVS had to go over the network, so it's
> hard to compare, really.  What exact log operations are slow for you vs
> the comparable CVS operations?  (A non-rhetorical question, by the way.
> I believe you when you say it's slow, I just want to narrow down what
> "it" is.)

[I'm not the OP]

Showing the log of a file or directory is much slower on bzr than on
CVS. `annotate' takes a few seconds for CVS but half a minute for bzr
with a warm cache on a 2.4 GHz Intel Q6600 CPU, which can be considered
a quite decent machine. `log file' and `annotate' are unbearably slow on
my netbook.

I extensively commented about this on the bzr ml and the response was
"making bzr faster is not one of our priorities."

>> Even updating one's repository takes many
>>minutes, something which took only a few seconds with CVS.
>
> Yes.  But remember: https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?107077
> (which is actively being worked on).

For the last months I was comparing update times, and Launchpad's smart
bzr server requires on average 30% of the time that the dumb server at
Savannah takes. This may sound impressive, but it is still way slower
than CVS. It may be unreasonable to compare CVS and bzr on this aspect,
but other well-known dVCS systems manage to be much faster than bzr
while moving around revisions.

So, I can understand Alan's frustration if he does not make use of the
dVCS features. OTOH, I'm quite happy about Emacs migration and I'm
convinced that more and more Emacs hackers will come to appreciate the
advantages of a dVCS, although bzr possibly is not the one who brings
the best experience right now.

[snip]