FreeBSD is planning to deprecate portsnap in favor of git or svnlite repos. As a heavy git user, part of me thinks, “about time!” There’s a number of discussions about the change on the email lists and the FreeBSD forums. What I wanted is some data on how the change will affect daily use. Should I use a deep or shallow clone? Which git repo should I follow? So I ran a few tests:
| portsnap | git clone (freebsd) | git clone (github) | git clone (freebsd, shallow) | |
| disk used (M) | 801 | 1,960 | 2,940 | 888 |
| compressratio | 2.23 | 1.22 | 1.11 | 1.83 |
| checkout time (real) | 3m 36s | 41m 49s | 7m 11s | 3m 12s |
This is a FreeBSD 13.2 host with /usr/ports on a ZFS filesystem with lz4 compression.
# zfs get compression zroot/usr/ports
zroot/usr/ports compression lz4
# rm -rf /usr/ports/* && rm -rf /usr/ports/.* && rm -rf /var/db/portsnap/*
# time portsnap fetch extract
Looking up portsnap.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 5 mirrors found.
Fetching public key from dualstack.aws.portsnap.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching snapshot tag from dualstack.aws.portsnap.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching snapshot metadata... done.
Fetching snapshot generated at Sun May 7 17:30:05 PDT 2023:
aa65708d65765ca77e1756616d249f3512ebb192c1ef16 102 MB 8131 kBps 13s
Extracting snapshot... done.
Verifying snapshot integrity... done.
Fetching snapshot tag from dualstack.aws.portsnap.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching snapshot metadata... done.
Updating from Sun May 7 17:30:05 PDT 2023 to Sun May 7 18:18:52 PDT 2023.
Fetching 5 metadata patches... done.
Applying metadata patches... done.
Fetching 0 metadata files... done.
<snip thousands of lines>
# zfs list zroot/usr/ports && zfs get compressratio zroot/usr/ports
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
zroot/usr/ports 801M 6.96G 813M /usr/ports
zroot/usr/ports compressratio 2.23x
# rm -rf /usr/ports/* && rm -rf /usr/ports/.*
# time git clone https://git.freebsd.org/ports.git /usr/ports
Cloning into '/usr/ports'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 5821903, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (942/942), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (126/126), done.
remote: Total 5821903 (delta 923), reused 816 (delta 816), pack-reused 5820961
Receiving objects: 100% (5821903/5821903), 1.06 GiB | 488.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (3512457/3512457), done.
Updating files: 100% (157219/157219), done.
real 41m48.997s
user 6m47.535s
sys 1m8.458s
# zfs list zroot/usr/ports && zfs get compressratio zroot/usr/ports
zroot/usr/ports 1.96G 5.80G 1.96G /usr/ports
zroot/usr/ports compressratio 1.22x