Some folks in #mercurial @ freenode.net just repeated the tests, so we have now a bit more stable data.
The evaluation shows the following:
- Initial clone: hg is about 4.4 times faster (about 2 min vs. 6 to 15 min)
- Repository sizes: the hg repo is about 1.92 smaller (~113M vs. 215M)
- Time for a full log: hg is about 2.36 times faster (~21s vs. ~50s)
- Time for annotating Misc/NEWS: hg is 1.5 times slower than bzr.
Without the result from bzr-1.6.1 it is 2.6 times slower (~43s vs 17s).
- Integrity checking: hg is by several orders of magnitude faster than bzr which just took too long - everyone stopped it after varying time (30s to 17 min), because the output spoke of hours remaining, one had an integrity error. hg needed about 1 min.
- Local clone: hg is 11 times faster (39s vs. 7.14 min).
Without the 1m15 result from the high disk load host it is 16 times faster (26s).
- Local clone with hot filesystem: hg is 14.9 times faster (26s vs. 6.5 min).
- Hot copy of just .bzr / .hg: The speeds are about equal, so the difference doesn't come from raw filesystem speed (2s).
- Additional Bazaar tests to check shared repository cloning performance (you only get this when you use a shared repository and only clone that shared repository): With shared repository and hardlinks bzr only needs about 5 seconds for cloning.