README.rst

hgwebdir: avoid systematic full garbage collection

Forcing a systematic full garbage collection upon each request
can serioulsy harm performance. This is reported as
https://bz.mercurial-scm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6075

With this change we're performing the full collection according
to a new setting, `experimental.web.full-garbage-collection-rate`.
The default value is 1, which doesn't change the behavior and will
allow us to test on real use cases. If the value is 0, no full garbage
collection occurs.

Regardless of the value of the setting, a partial garbage collection
still occurs upon each request (not attempting to collect objects from
the oldest generation). This should be enough to take care of
reference cycles that have been created by the last request
(assessment of this requires changing the setting, not to be 1).

In my experience chasing memory leaks in Mercurial servers,
the full collection never reclaimed any memory, but this is with
Python 3 and biased towards small repositories.

On the other hand, as explained in the Python developer docs [1],
frequent full collections are very harmful in terms of performance if
lots of objects survive the collection, and hence stay in the
oldest generation. Note that `gc.collect()` is indeed trying to
collect the oldest generation [2]. This happens usually in two cases:

- unwanted lingering objects (i.e., an actual memory leak that
  the GC cannot do anything about). Sadly, we have lots of those
  these days.
- desireable long-term objects, typically in caches (not inner caches
  carried by repositories, which should be collected with them). This
  is a subject of interest for the Heptapod project.

In short, the flat rate that this change still permits is
probably a bad idea in most cases, and the default value can
be tweaked later on (or even be set to 0) according to experiments
in the wild.

The test is inspired from test-hgwebdir-paths.py

[1] https://devguide.python.org/garbage_collector/#collecting-the-oldest-generation
[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/gc.html#gc.collect

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D11204

Mercurial
=========

Mercurial is a fast, easy to use, distributed revision control tool
for software developers.

Basic install::

 $ make            # see install targets
 $ make install    # do a system-wide install
 $ hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
 $ hg              # see help

Running without installing::

 $ make local      # build for inplace usage
 $ ./hg --version  # should show the latest version

See https://mercurial-scm.org/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.

Notes for packagers
===================

Mercurial ships a copy of the python-zstandard sources. This is used to
provide support for zstd compression and decompression functionality. The
module is not intended to be replaced by the plain python-zstandard nor
is it intended to use a system zstd library. Patches can result in hard
to diagnose errors and are explicitly discouraged as unsupported
configuration.