How to speed up diff computing?

[Sean Russell]

Ulrich Pfeifer wrote:
> the central server is a 16GB 2 processor sun workstation.  It does not
>   
Is this a Netra 240?  Sun's recently been marketting their servers with 
more, but far less powerful, CPUs.  This is fine when what you're doing 
is running a bunch of computationally inexpensive processes (like a web 
server), or when you have an application that is highly parallelized, 
but it means that the higher-end Sun servers are actually worse for 
single-threaded applications.  For example, my three-year-old 3GHz Intel 
desktop utterly spanks both the Netra 240 and the T5140, and can 
complete a computationally intensive, single threaded task in about a 
third of the time of the 240.

I'm pretty sure that Mercurial's diff algorithm isn't multi-threaded, 
and while it sounds like Matt thinks that your experience is an anomaly 
that might be fixable, I just wanted to point out that you can probably 
expect worse HG performance on your server than on your desktop if 
you're using a new-ish Sun server.

--- SER