view doc/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's documentation is kept in reStructuredText format, which is
a simple plain text format that's easy to read and edit:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

It's also convertible to a variety of other formats including standard
UNIX man page format and HTML. You'll need to install Docutils:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/

Use the Makefile in this directory to generate the man and HTML pages.