view README @ 27895:2d6a89e79b48

scmutil: support background file closing

Closing files that have been appended to is relatively slow on
Windows/NTFS. This makes several Mercurial operations slower on
Windows.

The workaround to this issue is conceptually simple: use multiple
threads for I/O. Unfortunately, Python doesn't scale well to multiple
threads because of the GIL. And, refactoring our code to use threads
everywhere would be a huge undertaking. So, we decide to tackle this
problem by starting small: establishing a thread pool for closing
files.

This patch establishes a mechanism for closing file handles on separate
threads. The coordinator object is basically a queue of file handles to
operate on and a thread pool consuming from the queue.

When files are opened through the VFS layer, the caller can specify
that delay closing is allowed.

A proxy class for file handles has been added. We must use a proxy
because it isn't possible to modify __class__ on built-in types. This
adds some overhead. But as future patches will show, this overhead
is cancelled out by the benefit of closing file handles on background
threads.

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.