Comment 5 for bug 477805

Martin, re comment #2: I can't run it in the VM - it's a server VM almost exactly matching the live server: there's no X installed on it.

I don't think it's sshfs that's at fault, but I have very little proof of it. I suspect, because of reports about bzr, that it's something about moving bzr data across a network. Or possibly that bzr is inefficient at diff on a large project.

But this is only a suspicion - I've not done any proper measurements to test this, and one reason it might not be this is that in the case of this VM, there's no real network since the VM is on the physical machine that I'm using to develop. But the traffic does go through the network stack, as far as I know. Though I'm not sure how the final step of the transfer of the network data from the VM to the physical machine happens, but I'm guessing it's through shared memory.

Anyhow did a brief, unscientific experiment. I installed bzr on the server and ran bzr diff on the project. At this point there are probably about 50 files amongst the 15,000 that have been changed. After about 5 minutes I killed it. This wasn't a very fair test - there was a lot running on this machine at the same time, and I think that it ended up using swap. But this suggests that the problem isn't Olive, or the network, but bzr diff.

When I have a less stressed machine, I'll try again.