Something somewhere is causing a weird timeout fetching over HTTP.
It's affecting both release branch and HEAD (2.9)

In all cases, I'm using libcurl 7.21.0 am also behind a proxy server

Slow 2.9
--------
$ time darcs get http://darcsden.com/kowey/snippets --no-cache
Directory '/tmp/snippets' already exists, creating repository as 
'/tmp/snippets_1'
Copying patches, to get lazy repository hit ctrl-C...
Finished getting.
It's too late to use atexit
darcs: /tmp/snippets_1/_darcs/patches/0000000287-
96e14f2fc1389a1e4614b6fa7ad0a9f751c91c78c8859fec7ca64e7172362889-
new_aeb0d9fceb59aa7bc3b6255283ddba5e: getSymbolicLinkStatus: does not 
exist (No such file or directory)

real	3m10.317s
user	0m0.460s
sys	0m0.080s

Slow 2.7
--------
$ time darcs-2.7.98.1 get http://darcsden.com/kowey/snippets --no-cache
Directory '/tmp/snippets' already exists, creating repository as 
'/tmp/snippets_3'
Copying patches, to get lazy repository hit ctrl-C...   
Finished getting.                                       
It's too late to use atexit      

real	3m15.196s
user	0m0.436s
sys	0m0.108s

Fast 2.5
--------
$ time darcs-2.5.2 get http://darcsden.com/kowey/snippets --no-cache
Directory '/tmp/snippets' already exists, creating repository as 
'/tmp/snippets_2'
Copying patches, to get lazy repository hit ctrl-C...
Finished getting.
It's too late to use atexit
darcs-2.5.2: /tmp/snippets_2/_darcs/patches/0000000287-
96e14f2fc1389a1e4614b6fa7ad0a9f751c91c78c8859fec7ca64e7172362889-
new_a6464520a3fb2932ec4f5c400e9f11be: getSymbolicLinkStatus: does not 
exist (No such file or directory)

real	0m0.860s
user	0m0.048s
sys	0m0.036s

Debug
------
Attached is a debug log showing where it seems to get stuck

Attachments

• debug

It's related to packs.  --no-packs makes it fast again.

Is this a blocker for the 2.8 release?

One option is to default to --nopacks for this release, making the 
feature experimental. The docs could even link to this bug report. So --
packs could be in 2.8 for early adopters, and solid by 2.10.