Improving Darcs Performance
by Adolfo Builes for haskell.org
The global cache acts as a giant patch pool where Darcs first looks for a patch when grabbing new patches. This saves time by not downloading the same patch twice from a remote server. It also saves space by storing the patch only once, if you ensure your cache and your repositories are on the same hardlink-supporting filesystem. Although, being the global cache on the biggest performance enhancing tools, there are issues which affect it in certain circumstances negatively.