The Bazaar team have been working on improving the performance of bzr on the gcc-linaro tree. Here's how long the steps take on my machine with the current 2.4 development version:

Update tip before branching: bzr pull 20.4 s (no revisions)

Make the branch: bzr branch --hardlink 4.5 optspace 26.8 s

Do some work and commit it: ...change two files bzr status 1:05 (again) bzr status 1.7 s bzr commit . 3.6 s

Push the changes up: bzr push lp:~michaelh1/gcc-linaro/optspace 3:47 ~9 MB (~40 kB/s which is saturating my uplink)

Later, the merge master pulls the branch down and merges: bzr branch --no-tree lp:~michaelh1/gcc-linaro/optspace 36 s ~900 k bzr merge ../optspace 3:26

The bzr status and bzr commit are quite good. I've asked them to look into bzr merge.

-- Michael