[Monotone-devel] user expirience (speed issue)

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hello monotone hackers,

I'm trying to switch to monotone for my projects, since I really love
it's concepts. I'm hacking on PostgreSQL, so that whole project was
imported from the cvs repository.

On my laptop, the cvs_import took ways to long, I've aborted it. Then
rerun the same on the server. I don't remember exactly, but monotone
cvs_import run for about 4-6 days.

Of course I didn't want to code on the server, so I needed to sync with
the laptop. No problem, I thought, and gave monotone pull a shot. But
that took several hours again... I got unpatient and tried another
thing: I simply downloaded the whole database from the server and use it
on the laptop. That worked just fine after importing private keys by
hand. Even updating on server or laptop and then syncing was no problem.

Now, if you want to try, you might pull my 'org.postgresql' branch from
my server at 213.133.111.57. But this takes terribly long (more than a
few hours). Other branches like org.postgresql.REL8_0_STABLE or so take
just some minutes, that's fine.

Some numbers:

size of the whole cvs repository: 297 MB
size of the whole monotone database: 324 MB (acceptable difference)
revisions in org.postgresql: 23663
monotone version on the server: monotone 0.24 (base revision:
d59847072bb689e952ab21db7f9fababdb80a19f)
monotone version on the laptop: monotone 0.24 (base revision:
08bc29e536a526d1dd91256626f16cd86b604a55)


A subsequent pull takes less than five minutes and gives:
monotone: connecting to 213.133.111.57
monotone: finding items to synchronize:
monotone:   certs |    keys | revisions
monotone:  71,061 |       1 |    23,663
monotone: bytes in | bytes out | certs in | revs in | revs written
monotone:      196 |     1,057 |        0 |       0 |            0
monotone: successful exchange with 213.133.111.57


Why is a monotone pull taking so much longer than a plain download?
What's the difference to downloading the database (other than being able
to pull only specific branch(es)?) What can be done to make a pull
faster?

Thank you for your time and for this great peace of software.

Regards
        Markus