mercurial/help/diffs.txt

protocol: send application/mercurial-0.2 responses to capable clients

With this commit, the HTTP transport now parses the X-HgProto-<N>
header to determine what media type and compression engine to use for
responses. So far, we only compress responses that are already being
compressed with zlib today (stream response types to specific
commands). We can expand things to cover additional response types
later.

The practical side-effect of this commit is that non-zlib compression
engines will be used if both ends support them. This means if both
ends have zstd support, zstd - not zlib - will be used to compress
data!

When cloning the mozilla-unified repository between a local HTTP
server and client, the benefits of non-zlib compression are quite
noticeable:

  engine     server CPU (s)   client CPU (s)    bundle size
zlib (l=6)      174.1            283.2         1,148,547,026
zstd (l=1)       99.2            267.3         1,127,513,841
zstd (l=3)      103.1            266.9         1,018,861,363
zstd (l=7)      128.3            269.7           919,190,278
zstd (l=10)     162.0               -            894,547,179
none             95.3            277.2         4,097,566,064

The default zstd compression level is 3. So if you deploy zstd
capable Mercurial to your clients and servers and CPU time on
your server is dominated by "getbundle" requests (clients cloning
and pulling) - and my experience at Mozilla tells me this is often
the case - this commit could drastically reduce your server-side
CPU usage *and* save on bandwidth costs!

Another benefit of this change is that server operators can install
*any* compression engine. While it isn't enabled by default, the
"none" compression engine can now be used to disable wire protocol
compression completely. Previously, commands like "getbundle" always
zlib compressed output, adding considerable overhead to generating
responses. If you are on a high speed network and your server is under
high load, it might be advantageous to trade bandwidth for CPU.
Although, zstd at level 1 doesn't use that much CPU, so I'm not
convinced that disabling compression wholesale is worthwhile. And, my
data seems to indicate a slow down on the client without compression.
I suspect this is due to a lack of buffering resulting in an increase
in socket read() calls and/or the fact we're transferring an extra 3 GB
of data (parsing HTTP chunked transfer and processing extra TCP packets
can add up). This is definitely worth investigating and optimizing. But
since the "none" compressor isn't enabled by default, I'm inclined to
punt on this issue.

This commit introduces tons of tests. Some of these should arguably
have been implemented on previous commits. But it was difficult to
test without the server functionality in place.

Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions of
a file is compatible with the unified format of GNU diff, which can be
used by GNU patch and many other standard tools.

While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the
following information:

- executable status and other permission bits
- copy or rename information
- changes in binary files
- creation or deletion of empty files

Mercurial also supports the extended diff format from the git VCS
which addresses these limitations. The git diff format is not produced
by default because a few widespread tools still do not understand this
format.

This means that when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository
(e.g. with :hg:`export`), you should be careful about things like file
copies and renames or other things mentioned above, because when
applying a standard diff to a different repository, this extra
information is lost. Mercurial's internal operations (like push and
pull) are not affected by this, because they use an internal binary
format for communicating changes.

To make Mercurial produce the git extended diff format, use the --git
option available for many commands, or set 'git = True' in the [diff]
section of your configuration file. You do not need to set this option
when importing diffs in this format or using them in the mq extension.