annotate CONTRIBUTING @ 30817:2b279126b8f5

revlog: use compression engine APIs for decompression

Now that compression engines declare their header in revlog chunks
and can decompress revlog chunks, we refactor revlog.decompress()
to use them.

Making full use of the property that revlog compressor objects are
reusable, revlog instances now maintain a dict mapping an engine's
revlog header to a compressor object. This is not only a performance
optimization for engines where compressor object reuse can result in
better performance, but it also serves as a cache of header values
so we don't need to perform redundant lookups against the compression
engine manager. (Yes, I measured and the overhead of a function call
versus a dict lookup was observed.)

Replacing the previous inline lookup table with a dict lookup was
measured to make chunk reading ~2.5% slower on changelogs and ~4.5%
slower on manifests. So, the inline lookup table has been mostly
preserved so we don't lose performance. This is unfortunate. But
many decompression operations complete in microseconds, so Python
attribute lookup, dict lookup, and function calls do matter.

The impact of this change on mozilla-unified is as follows:

$ hg perfrevlogchunks -c
! chunk
! wall 1.953663 comb 1.950000 user 1.920000 sys 0.030000 (best of 6)
! wall 1.946000 comb 1.940000 user 1.910000 sys 0.030000 (best of 6)
! chunk batch
! wall 1.791075 comb 1.800000 user 1.760000 sys 0.040000 (best of 6)
! wall 1.785690 comb 1.770000 user 1.750000 sys 0.020000 (best of 6)

$ hg perfrevlogchunks -m
! chunk
! wall 2.587262 comb 2.580000 user 2.550000 sys 0.030000 (best of 4)
! wall 2.616330 comb 2.610000 user 2.560000 sys 0.050000 (best of 4)
! chunk batch
! wall 2.427092 comb 2.420000 user 2.400000 sys 0.020000 (best of 5)
! wall 2.462061 comb 2.460000 user 2.400000 sys 0.060000 (best of 4)

Changelog chunk reading is slightly faster but manifest reading is
slower. What gives?

On this repo, 99.85% of changelog entries are zlib compressed (the 'x'
header). On the manifest, 67.5% are zlib and 32.4% are '\0'. This patch
swapped the test order of 'x' and '\0' so now 'x' is tested first. This
makes changelogs faster since they almost always hit the first branch.
This makes a significant percentage of manifest '\0' chunks slower
because that code path now performs an extra test. Yes, I too can't
believe we're able to measure the impact of an if..elif with simple
string compares. I reckon this code would benefit from being written
in C...

Our full contribution guidelines are in our wiki, please see:

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges

If you just want a checklist to follow, you can go straight to

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges#Submission_checklist

If you can't run the entire testsuite for some reason (it can be
difficult on Windows), please at least run `contrib/check-code.py` on
any files you've modified and run `python contrib/check-commit` on any
commits you've made (for example, `python contrib/check-commit
273ce12ad8f1` will report some style violations on a very old commit).