changeset 49503:c6a1beba27e9

bisect: avoid copying ancestor list for non-merge commits

During a bisection, hg needs to compute a list of all ancestors for every
candidate commit. This is accomplished via a bottom-up traversal of the set of
candidates, during which each revision's ancestor list is populated using the
ancestor list of its parent(s). Previously, this involved copying the entire
list, which could be very long in if the bisection range was large.

To help improve this, we can observe that each candidate commit is visited
exactly once, at which point its ancestor list is copied into its children's
lists and then dropped. In the case of non-merge commits, a commit's ancestor
list consists exactly of its parent's list plus itself. This means that we can
trivially reuse the parent's existing list for one of its non-merge children,
which avoids copying entirely if that commit is the parent's only child. This
makes bisections over linear ranges of commits much faster.

During some informal testing in the large publicly-available `mozilla-central`
repository, this noticeably sped up bisections over large ranges of history:

Setup:
  $ cd mozilla-central
  $ hg bisect --reset
  $ hg bisect --good 0
  $ hg log -r tip -T '{rev}\n'
  628417

Test:
  $ time hg bisect --bad tip --noupdate

Before:
  real    3m35.927s
  user    3m35.553s
  sys     0m0.319s

After:
  real    1m41.142s
  user    1m40.810s
  sys     0m0.285s

--- a/mercurial/hbisect.py	Mon Jul 25 15:39:04 2022 +0200
+++ b/mercurial/hbisect.py	Tue Aug 30 15:29:55 2022 -0400
@@ -115,11 +115,21 @@
             poison.update(children.get(rev, []))
             continue
 
+        unvisited = []
         for c in children.get(rev, []):
             if ancestors[c]:
                 ancestors[c] = list(set(ancestors[c] + a))
             else:
+                unvisited.append(c)
+
+        # Reuse existing ancestor list for the first unvisited child to avoid
+        # excessive copying for linear portions of history.
+        if unvisited:
+            first = unvisited.pop(0)
+            for c in unvisited:
                 ancestors[c] = a + [c]
+            a.append(first)
+            ancestors[first] = a
 
     assert best_rev is not None
     best_node = changelog.node(best_rev)