view doc/README @ 49899:3eef8baf6b92

worker: avoid reading 1 byte at a time from the OS pipe

Apparently `pickle.load` does a lot of small reads, many of them
literally 1-byte, so it benefits greatly from buffering.

This change enables the buffering, at the cost of more complicated
interaction with the `selector` API.

On one repository with ~400k files this reduces the time by about ~30s,
from ~60 to ~30s. The difference is so large because the actual updating
work is parallellized, while these small reads are bottlenecking the
central hg process.

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.