I find that darcs2 takes ~ 60 times longer to do `darcs w -ls' on a largish
real-life SVN tree. Here's some timings:

  prompt>  rm -rf _darcs ; /usr/bin/darcs init ; time /usr/bin/darcs w -ls >
/dev/null
    6.912u 0.232s 0:07.22 98.8%     0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
    7.188u 0.296s 0:07.52 99.3%     0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

  prompt>  rm -rf _darcs ; darcs2 init [--hashed] ; time darcs2 w -ls > /dev/null
    396.504u 2.352s 6:52.75 96.6%   0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
    446.899u 2.480s 7:49.69 95.6%   0+0k 0+0io 1pf+0w
    386.548u 2.276s 6:37.59 97.7%   0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

  prompt>  rm -rf .hg ; hg init ; time hg add > /dev/null
    0.856u 0.244s 0:01.11 98.1%     0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
    0.888u 0.240s 0:01.11 100.9%    0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

My darcs versions:

  prompt> /usr/bin/darcs --version
    1.0.9rc1 (release candidate 1)

  prompt>  darcs2 --version
    2.0.0pre3 (unknown)
    [static binary downloaded from the web site]

The tree I am trying to import contains 6467 files (mostly Java + Python) of ~
42 MB in total.

The file sizes have the following statistics:

average size = 6.5kB
quartiles:
   0% (=min) :  2 B
  25%        : 712 B
  50%        : 1.8 kB  (= median)
  75%        : 4.8 kB
 100% (=max) : 1.6 MB

I cannot give access to the data, but if nobody else has found this type of
slowdown, I could try to synthesize directory trees with similar statistics.