[darcs-users] darcs stalls in diffing dir...

[Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale]

Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
>> I was trying to use darcs for a 50Mb project, and after 20+ commits
>> it started to be extremely slow.  The last message that I see on the
>> screen before it goes into Nirvana is 'diffing dir...'
> 
> Are you actually committing 50MB in a single record?  You'll get
> better performance by making smaller commits (having a large tree is
> okay, but Darcs is certainly not optimised for very large imports.)
> 
> Are you storing autogenerated files?  Are they marked binary?  What
> does ``darcs resolve'' say?

Just thought I'd add a data point to this. I also had darcs take a very 
long time (hours - I killed it) while "diffing dir". The problem I had 
was a file in the repo that I had locally modified, and was also touched 
by the patch I was trying to pull. "darcs revert" and retrying the pull 
solved the problem (the pull the only took a few seconds).

The file was objdump output. The locally-modified version was seriously 
changed - I had cut everything out of the file except for the 
disassembly of a single function. The patch changed every line of the 
file. The patch is small: the .gz is 55k. The file is autogenerated, but 
is not marked binary. The file size is about 65k.

Both darcs 1.0.3 and darcs 1.0.6 were symptomatic (on OS X).

If someone is interested, I can attempt to reproduce it.

- Nicholas