git vs mercurial performance

Do any performance benchmarks exist?

I'm looking to create a repo and commit/ push for legacy code that runs several gigs deep.

Is either faster / footprint etc?

I apologize if this is too vague...

You don't choose between git and mercurial because of performance. They're both good.

Just do the kinds of things you'd be doing and measure. You're likely to get the largest performance variation on the first import -- that won't matter much. Keep digging.

Space-wise, the one place git will definitely win is if you have the same content in lots of different paths in its lifetime. That is, if your several gigs of files get moved. git's model supports this better than hg's. That very well may not matter to you.

In both cases, you should consider whether your several gigs of repository actually represents the source code for a single project.

But again, it would be unwise to choose between these two similar and active projects because of raw performance.