Comment by nullnix

Yeah, that's the problem; it's optimizing for the wrong thing. It speeds up blame at the expense of absolutely every other operation you ever need to carry out; the only thing which avoids reading (or, for checkins, writing) the whole file is a simple log. Blame is a relatively rare operation: its needs should not dominate the representation.

The fact that the largest file you mention is frankly tiny shows why your performance was good: we had ~50,000 line text files (yeah, I know, damn copy-and-paste coders) with a thousand-odd revisions and a resulting SCCS filesize exceeding three million lines, and every one of those lines had to be read on every checkout: dozens to hundreds of megabytes, and of course the cache would hardly ever be hot where that much data was concerned, so it all had to come off the disk and/or across NFS, taking tens of seconds or more in many cases. RCS could have avoided reading all but 50,000 of them in the common case of checkouts of most recent changes. (git would have reduced read volume even more because although it is deltified the chains are of finite length, unlike the weave, and all the data is compressed.)