dan@geek.com.au (Daniel Carosone) writes:

>  - On my laptop, in order to let the disk stay spun down more of
>    the time, I run filesystems noatime,nodevmtime, further reducing
>    the load and impact of CVS.

Yes, laptop disks are slow and you want to cache as much data as
possible. I found that the standard buffer cache size on my laptop
is not large enough to store all metadata of the source tree.
Bumping up kern.maxvnodes with sysctl helps.