Unscientific 4.0 benchmark test

As you all know by now we’re heavily working on Plastic SCM 4.0, the upcoming release where we’re trying to put together all the suggestions we got from our user base during the last years (specially the “big ones” which can’t easily be included in minor releases) together with a number of “hard-core” changes impacting the branching and merging engine and the replication (distributed) one.

Hence 4.0 will come with a number of new features, including new GUI and new Distributed Branch Explorer but also heavily improving performance. And that’s exactly what I’ll be sharing today: how 4.0 performs in some simple ops against well-known DVCS.

I asked to gather some numbers after reading the following tweet from Eric Sink (the brain behind Veracity () and the great Vault).



So, we tried a similar scenario on a Dell XPS 13 Laptop (4GB RAM, 7000rpm HD… well, you can find the full specs online, not a beast!) running Windows 7, using two different sets: a small repo (similar to the one used in the previous tweet) and a “huge” one (similar to the ones used in the gaming industry).
And here you’ve the results: first the small one, add+commit 2752 files, 45MB: hg: 7.8s git 3.6 s plastic 3.4s

It is a really tiny test but we’re happy to outperform the other DVCS already.
We’re using: Plastic 4.0.192 (internal release) using SQLite backend, Hg 1.6.2, Git 1.7.4.msysgit.0.



And now let’s give a try to a biggest test using 192k files and 33k directories and a total of 5.82GB. I’m happy to announce that under these circumstances Plastic is even better (our goal is to become the best DVCS handling big files): 192k files, 5.82GB: hg: 1563 s git 1256 s plastic 601 s



Enjoy!

New documentation: migrating from other popular SCM systems

Just a quick note to let you know that the main product documentation page on our Web site includes a new category, "Migrating from other SCMs". It contains writeups on migrating to Plastic SCM from these well-known systems: Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS), CVS, Subversion, and Perforce.

These writeups are not "marketing fluff" -- they are technical discussions, aimed at helping users who are transitioning to Plastic SCM (or just thinking about such a transition!). We welcome all comments on these migration documents.