mercurial/help/filesets.txt

revlog: use an LRU cache for delta chain bases

Profiling using statprof revealed a hotspot during changegroup
application calculating delta chain bases on generaldelta repos.
Essentially, revlog._addrevision() was performing a lot of redundant
work tracing the delta chain as part of determining when the chain
distance was acceptable. This was most pronounced when adding
revisions to manifests, which can have delta chains thousands of
revisions long.

There was a delta chain base cache on revlogs before, but it only
captured a single revision. This was acceptable before generaldelta,
when _addrevision would build deltas from the previous revision and
thus we'd pretty much guarantee a cache hit when resolving the delta
chain base on a subsequent _addrevision call. However, it isn't
suitable for generaldelta because parent revisions aren't necessarily
the last processed revision.

This patch converts the delta chain base cache to an LRU dict cache.
The cache can hold multiple entries, so generaldelta repos have a
higher chance of getting a cache hit.

The impact of this change when processing changegroup additions is
significant. On a generaldelta conversion of the "mozilla-unified"
repo (which contains heads of the main Firefox repositories in
chronological order - this means there are lots of transitions between
heads in revlog order), this change has the following impact when
performing an `hg unbundle` of an uncompressed bundle of the repo:

before: 5:42 CPU time
after:  4:34 CPU time

Most of this time is saved when applying the changelog and manifest
revlogs:

before: 2:30 CPU time
after:  1:17 CPU time

That nearly a 50% reduction in CPU time applying changesets and
manifests!

Applying a gzipped bundle of the same repo (effectively simulating a
`hg clone` over HTTP) showed a similar speedup:

before: 5:53 CPU time
after:  4:46 CPU time

Wall time improvements were basically the same as CPU time.

I didn't measure explicitly, but it feels like most of the time
is saved when processing manifests. This makes sense, as large
manifests tend to have very long delta chains and thus benefit the
most from this cache.

So, this change effectively makes changegroup application (which is
used by `hg unbundle`, `hg clone`, `hg pull`, `hg unshelve`, and
various other commands) significantly faster when delta chains are
long (which can happen on repos with large numbers of files and thus
large manifests).

In theory, this change can result in more memory utilization. However,
we're caching a dict of ints. At most we have 200 ints + Python object
overhead per revlog. And, the cache is really only populated when
performing read-heavy operations, such as adding changegroups or
scanning an individual revlog. For memory bloat to be an issue, we'd
need to scan/read several revisions from several revlogs all while
having active references to several revlogs. I don't think there are
many operations that do this, so I don't think memory bloat from the
cache will be an issue.

Mercurial supports a functional language for selecting a set of
files.

Like other file patterns, this pattern type is indicated by a prefix,
'set:'. The language supports a number of predicates which are joined
by infix operators. Parenthesis can be used for grouping.

Identifiers such as filenames or patterns must be quoted with single
or double quotes if they contain characters outside of
``[.*{}[]?/\_a-zA-Z0-9\x80-\xff]`` or if they match one of the
predefined predicates. This generally applies to file patterns other
than globs and arguments for predicates.

Special characters can be used in quoted identifiers by escaping them,
e.g., ``\n`` is interpreted as a newline. To prevent them from being
interpreted, strings can be prefixed with ``r``, e.g. ``r'...'``.

There is a single prefix operator:

``not x``
  Files not in x. Short form is ``! x``.

These are the supported infix operators:

``x and y``
  The intersection of files in x and y. Short form is ``x & y``.

``x or y``
  The union of files in x and y. There are two alternative short
  forms: ``x | y`` and ``x + y``.

``x - y``
  Files in x but not in y.

The following predicates are supported:

.. predicatesmarker

Some sample queries:

- Show status of files that appear to be binary in the working directory::

    hg status -A "set:binary()"

- Forget files that are in .hgignore but are already tracked::

    hg forget "set:hgignore() and not ignored()"

- Find text files that contain a string::

    hg files "set:grep(magic) and not binary()"

- Find C files in a non-standard encoding::

    hg files "set:**.c and not encoding('UTF-8')"

- Revert copies of large binary files::

    hg revert "set:copied() and binary() and size('>1M')"

- Remove files listed in foo.lst that contain the letter a or b::

    hg remove "set: 'listfile:foo.lst' and (**a* or **b*)"

See also :hg:`help patterns`.