Optimising Darcs for medium to large repositories

by Petr Ročkai for haskell.org

Darcs is known to have performance issues when repositories extend beyond certain size. There are several "directions" in which repositories grow -- out of these, size of the working tree and length of history my primary focus. Common commands involving the working tree should be comfortable to use and should not introduce delays in workflow. Moreover, big repositories should be stored efficiently and it should be possible to efficiently retrieve both full repositories and new patches remotely.