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
#require unix-permissions no-root no-windows no-rhg
XXX-RHG this test hangs if `hg` is really `rhg`. This was hidden by the use of
`alias hg=rhg` by run-tests.py. With such alias removed, this test is revealed
buggy. This need to be resolved sooner than later.
initial setup
$ cat << EOF >> $HGRCPATH
> [ui]
> ssh="$PYTHON" "$TESTDIR/dummyssh"
> EOF
repository itself is non-readable
---------------------------------
$ hg init no-read
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/no-read
000000000000
$ chmod a-rx no-read
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/no-read
remote: abort: Permission denied: *$TESTTMP/no-read/.hg* (glob)
abort: no suitable response from remote hg
[255]
special case files are visible, but unreadable
----------------------------------------------
This is "similar" to the test above, but the directory is "traversable". This
seems an unexpected case in real life, but we test it anyway.
$ hg init other
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/other
000000000000
$ for item in `find other | sort -r` ; do
> chmod a-r $item
> done
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/other
remote: abort: Permission denied: '$TESTTMP/other/.hg/requires'
abort: no suitable response from remote hg
[255]
directory toward the repository is read only
--------------------------------------------
$ mkdir deep
$ hg init deep/nested
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/deep/nested
000000000000
$ chmod a-rx deep
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/deep/nested
remote: abort: Permission denied: *$TESTTMP/deep/nested/.hg* (glob)
abort: no suitable response from remote hg
[255]
repository has wrong requirement
--------------------------------
$ hg init repo-future
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/repo-future
000000000000
$ echo flying-car >> repo-future/.hg/requires
$ hg id ssh://user@dummy/repo-future
remote: abort: repository requires features unknown to this Mercurial: flying-car
remote: (see https://mercurial-scm.org/wiki/MissingRequirement for more information)
abort: no suitable response from remote hg
[255]