git-annex uses FilePath (String) extensively. That's a slow data type. Converting to ByteString, and RawFilePath, should speed it up significantly, according to [[/profiling]]. I've made a test branch, `bs`, to see what kind of performance improvement to expect. Most commands don't built yet in that branch, but `git annex find` does. Speedups range from 28-66%. The files fly by much more snappily. As well as adding back all the code that was disabled to get it to build, the `bs` branch has quite a lot of things still needing work, including: * Eliminate all the fromRawFilePath, toRawFilePath, encodeBS, decodeBS conversions. Or at least most of them. There are likely quite a few places where a value is converted back and forth several times. As a first step, profile and look for the hot spots. For example, keyFile uses fromRawFilePath and that adds around 3% overhead in `git-annex find`. Converting it to a RawFilePath needs a version of `` for RawFilePaths. * System.FilePath is not available for RawFilePath, and many of the conversions are to get a FilePath in order to use that library. It should be entirely straightforward to make a version of System.FilePath that can operate on RawFilePath, except possibly there could be some complications due to Windows. * Use versions of IO actions like getFileStatus that take a RawFilePath, avoiding a conversion. Note that these are only available on unix, not windows, so a compatability shim will be needed. (I can't seem to find any library that provides one.)