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I've seen a ton of statistics about how git is faster than svn, but most of those statistics are only comparing git's local operations to SVN's equivalent remote operation. Dos anyone have links to hard data comparing git's speed with remote operations to SVN's speed with remote operations?

+2  A: 

As mentioned in the comments, the remote operations involved with Git are quite different than with Subversion:

  • git will initially get all the history of a repo, and then can work autonomously.
  • Subversion will only get the most recent history, and request more information to the server when needed.

But do not forget that Git has been built around one major feature: being able to apply dozen of patches (and/or merges) fast.
That is the one operation which should be measured between the two tools, and one where Git has a sizable advantage, the comparison and merge of different versions of a file being a pure local operation, as illustrated in this Git Subversion comparison page (disclaimer: written in the Git wiki)

Git is extremely fast. Since all operations (except for push and fetch) are local there is no network latency involved to:

That means compare only remote operations will greatly restrict the features being compared...

VonC
Note that while "svn diff" and "svn status" does not need network and is done locally (thanks to Subversion keeping copy of pristine sources `.svn`), "svn diff -rN" and "svn log" are done over the network, contrary to "git diff <commit>" and "git log".
Jakub Narębski
+1  A: 

Take a look at references (original sources) mentioned on http://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitBenchmarks.

Some of them did include comparison of speed with Subversion, if I remember it correctly.

Jakub Narębski