fork performance

[Lloyd Parkes <lloyd%must-have-coffee.gen.nz@localhost>]

So, with a slightly closer look, a guess and some tests to verify my guess, and 
I think I have found my performance problem converting the NetBSD CVS 
repositories to Mercurial.

The CVS server forks once for each command it receives, and it receives a lot 
of commands. NetBSD fork(2) seems to be much slower than OS X fork(2). Since 
the cvs server never execs anything, vfork isn't an option. I have implemented 
a program that can do the CVS log extraction efficiently and correctly (i.e. 
without forking), but extracting the versioned data itself isn't trivial. 

Cheers,
Lloyd