revlog: introduce an experimental flag to slice chunks reads when too sparse
Delta chains can become quite sparse if there is a lot of unrelated data between
relevant pieces. Right now, revlog always reads all the necessary data for the
delta chain in one single read. This can lead to a lot of unrelated data to be
read (see issue5482 for more details).
One can use the `experimental.maxdeltachainspan` option with a large value
(or -1) to easily produce a very sparse delta chain.
This change introduces the ability to slice the chunks retrieval into multiple
reads, skipping large sections of unrelated data. Preliminary testing shows
interesting results. For example the peak memory consumption to read a manifest
on a large repository is reduced from 600MB to 250MB (200MB without
maxdeltachainspan). However, the slicing itself and the multiple reads can have
an negative impact on performance. This is why the new feature is hidden behind
an experimental flag.
Future changesets will add various parameters to control the slicing heuristics.
We hope to experiment a wide variety of repositories during 4.4 and hopefully
turn the feature on by default in 4.5.
As a first try, the algorithm itself is prone to deep changes. However, we wish
to define APIs and have a baseline to work on.
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.