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
$ cat <<EOF > merge
> import sys, os
> print("merging for", os.path.basename(sys.argv[1]))
> EOF
$ HGMERGE="$PYTHON ../merge"; export HGMERGE
$ hg init A1
$ cd A1
$ echo This is file foo1 > foo
$ echo This is file bar1 > bar
$ hg add foo bar
$ hg commit -m "commit text"
$ cd ..
$ hg clone A1 B1
updating to branch default
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd A1
$ rm bar
$ hg remove bar
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
$ cd ../B1
$ echo This is file foo22 > foo
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
$ cd ..
$ hg clone A1 A2
updating to branch default
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ hg clone B1 B2
updating to branch default
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd A1
$ hg pull ../B1
pulling from ../B1
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)
new changesets b90e70beeb58
1 local changesets published
(run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)
$ hg merge
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
bar should remain deleted.
$ hg manifest --debug
f9b0e817f6a48de3564c6b2957687c5e7297c5a0 644 foo
$ cd ../B2
$ hg pull ../A2
pulling from ../A2
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 0 changes to 0 files (+1 heads)
new changesets e1adc944e717
(run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)
$ hg merge
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 1 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
bar should remain deleted.
$ hg manifest --debug
f9b0e817f6a48de3564c6b2957687c5e7297c5a0 644 foo
$ cd ..