Comment 7 for bug 405251

Ok, the branch operation completed after taking 1 hour 20 minutes(!) to branch; this used to take 20 secs. It branched 1343 revisions. Most of the hour was spent showing the exact progress bar shown before; only the last 2 minutes or so did the progress bar change.

The new branch has a single .pack file of 409MB. bzr info on that new branch states:
Standalone tree (format: 1.14-rich-root)
Location:
  branch root: .

Related branches:
  parent branch: /home/jal/bzr/vp-trunk

Format:
       control: Meta directory format 1
  working tree: Working tree format 5
        branch: Branch format 7
    repository: Packs 6 rich-root (uses btree indexes, requires bzr 1.9)

In the working tree:
     14956 unchanged
         0 modified
         0 added
         0 removed
         0 renamed
         0 unknown
         0 ignored
      1699 versioned subdirectories

Branch history:
      1343 revisions
       416 days old
   first revision: Thu 2008-06-05 23:32:54 +0200
  latest revision: Fri 2009-07-24 18:59:42 +0200

Repository:
      6706 revisions

The "old" (source) repository is a shared repository (the branch directory there has no .bzr/repository); the shared repo contains the following .pack files:
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 105855630 2009-07-06 12:21 01125177ff170f19a5350760681788d2.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 92508459 2009-07-15 10:13 044a6c79c07933c817bfaa5fe2aefaea.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 3693532 2009-07-15 17:56 134fa02d2b7f2428fef7e2b9d7bf0849.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 6706520 2009-07-08 11:39 3dd7fdd11a10663a6d9c7f05731a96d9.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 76707414 2009-07-27 12:26 3debfa32e17c04c3fce3cd1c7296b24a.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 8902487 2009-07-17 19:16 3f13b74bb82f12fcd01fb72b1cbe96bc.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 13907569 2009-07-06 14:05 4bfb7e9120c6d8d69565ef53f0bb1903.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 21023993 2009-07-06 12:52 74a9c2ca690d44152c80204c4b21b295.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 91094724 2009-07-06 13:57 a007b533ab4cdad5ba747a4842d1fe52.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 13687 2009-07-27 13:47 a1a66860581e95dd23dfdad253a10ac9.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 1782016 2009-07-27 15:59 c14de2d325ad282799f20fa110d15e80.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 22923037 2009-07-06 17:53 d0798f5a75b83fa45bad16ac864f65cb.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 6156224 2009-07-16 17:44 e201f81bcef47df7b627af92d6fc8a5a.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 22157957 2009-07-17 12:44 eec828493036f356003a05938bc734e0.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 1500511 2009-07-08 11:39 f9c37aa04ed5b5aa45f09a35e311079a.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 4255021 2009-07-27 14:54 fcfaf7d3e3ad5813bc77728e30f9abaf.pack
-rw-r--r-- 1 jal jal 1900754 2009-07-17 19:24 fdc2bec64f92070973c037da7fcaf4c0.pack
totalling 459MB. What is remarkable is that there are a few files with todays change date (2009-07-27); the largest is 76MB while the rest is very small.

After the bzr pack (which took around 2 minutes) in the shared repo (not the branch dir again) there was a single .pack file left with a size of 459MB.