tests/test-record.t

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

Set up a repo

  $ cat <<EOF >> $HGRCPATH
  > [ui]
  > interactive = true
  > [extensions]
  > record =
  > EOF

  $ hg init a
  $ cd a

Record help

  $ hg record -h
  hg record [OPTION]... [FILE]...
  
  interactively select changes to commit
  
      If a list of files is omitted, all changes reported by 'hg status' will be
      candidates for recording.
  
      See 'hg help dates' for a list of formats valid for -d/--date.
  
      If using the text interface (see 'hg help config'), you will be prompted
      for whether to record changes to each modified file, and for files with
      multiple changes, for each change to use. For each query, the following
      responses are possible:
  
        y - record this change
        n - skip this change
        e - edit this change manually
  
        s - skip remaining changes to this file
        f - record remaining changes to this file
  
        d - done, skip remaining changes and files
        a - record all changes to all remaining files
        q - quit, recording no changes
  
        ? - display help
  
      This command is not available when committing a merge.
  
  (use 'hg help -e record' to show help for the record extension)
  
  options ([+] can be repeated):
  
   -A --addremove           mark new/missing files as added/removed before
                            committing
      --close-branch        mark a branch head as closed
      --amend               amend the parent of the working directory
   -s --secret              use the secret phase for committing
   -e --edit                invoke editor on commit messages
   -I --include PATTERN [+] include names matching the given patterns
   -X --exclude PATTERN [+] exclude names matching the given patterns
   -m --message TEXT        use text as commit message
   -l --logfile FILE        read commit message from file
   -d --date DATE           record the specified date as commit date
   -u --user USER           record the specified user as committer
   -S --subrepos            recurse into subrepositories
   -w --ignore-all-space    ignore white space when comparing lines
   -b --ignore-space-change ignore changes in the amount of white space
   -B --ignore-blank-lines  ignore changes whose lines are all blank
   -Z --ignore-space-at-eol ignore changes in whitespace at EOL
  
  (some details hidden, use --verbose to show complete help)

Select no files

  $ touch empty-rw
  $ hg add empty-rw

  $ hg record empty-rw<<EOF
  > n
  > EOF
  diff --git a/empty-rw b/empty-rw
  new file mode 100644
  abort: empty commit message
  [10]

  $ hg tip -p
  changeset:   -1:000000000000
  tag:         tip
  user:        
  date:        Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000