After investigating a lot of blind alleys I think I’ve solved a problem with pushing and pulling to and from a remote repository being very slow. darcs was issuing hundreds of scp commands just to push up a one line change. This seemed to be related to the _darcs/inventory file being a couple of thousand lines long (should be much smaller) on the remote repo.
In the final analysis my advice is very simple:
- Make sure you have recently done a
darcs tag - Issue a
darcs optimize --reorder-patchescommand (the reorder patches part may be unnecessary and cause it to be much slower, but it worked for me although it took three hours).
This reduced push/pull time from 3 minutes to nearer 3 seconds.