[darcs-users] Performance, SSH vs Samba

[Jamie Webb]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 06:37:43PM +0000, Grant Husbands wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm seeing a marked performance difference between using a mapped drive 
> (remotely mounted via samba) and using ssh (to the same machine) for my 
> source darcs repositories. For example, a pull, when there are 25 
> patches to pull, takes about three seconds to start asking questions, 
> through the mapped drive, or 57 seconds via SSH. Even when there are no 
> patches to pull or push, the operation takes 1 second through the mapped 
> drive and 28 seconds via SSH.
> 
> Does anyone else see similar performance figures or is this likely just 
> a peculiarity of the machine to which I'm connecting?  Is there any easy 
> way to speed up SSH access?

SSH connection setup can very time-consuming, and Darcs has a tendency
to connect multiple times. You can speed it up hugely by reusing SSH
connections, using the multiplexing feature that was added about a
year ago. It's not very well documented unfortunately. See
ControlMaster in ssh_config(5), and random stuff on the Web...

-- Jamie Webb