view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 26379:39d643252b9f

revlog: use existing file handle when reading during _addrevision

_addrevision() may need to read from revlogs as part of computing
deltas. Previously, we would flush existing file handles and open
a new, short-lived file handle to perform the reading.

If we have an existing file handle, it seems logical to reuse it
for reading instead of opening a new file handle. This patch
makes that the new behavior.

After this patch, revlog files are only reopened when adding
revisions if the revlog is switched from inline to non-inline.

On Linux when unbundling a bundle of the mozilla-central repo, this
patch has the following impact on system call counts:

Call     Before     After       Delta
write    827,639    673,390   -154,249
open     700,103    684,089    -16,014
read      74,489     74,489          0
fstat    493,924    461,896    -32,028
close    249,131    233,117    -16,014
stat     242,001    242,001          0
lstat     18,676     18,676          0
lseek     20,268     20,268          0
ioctl     14,652     13,173     -1,479
TOTAL  3,180,758  2,930,679   -250,079

It's worth noting that many of the open() calls fail due to missing
files. That's why there are many more open() calls than close().

Despite the significant system call reduction, this change does not
seem to have a significant performance impact on Linux.

On Windows 10 (not a VM, on a SSD), this patch appears to reduce
unbundle time for mozilla-central from ~960s to ~920s. This isn't
as significant as I was hoping. But a decrease it is nonetheless.
Still, Windows unbundle performance is still >2x slower than Linux.

Despite the lack of significant gains, fewer system calls is fewer
system calls. If nothing else, this will narrow the focus of potential
areas to optimize in the future.

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.