view rust/README.rst @ 42354:dbd0fcca6dfc

discovery: slowly increase sampling size

Some pathological discovery runs can requires many roundtrip. When this happens
things can get very slow.

To make the algorithm more resilience again such pathological case. We slowly
increase the sample size with each roundtrip (+5%). This will have a negligible
impact on "normal" discovery with few roundtrips, but a large positive impact of
case with many roundtrips. Asking more question per roundtrip helps to reduce
the undecided set faster. Instead of reducing the undecided set a linear speed
(in the worst case), we reduce it as a guaranteed (small) exponential rate. The
data below show this slow ramp up in sample size:

round trip    |    1 |     5 |    10 |    20 |     50 |     100 |       130 |
sample size   |  200 |   254 |   321 |   517 |  2 199 |  25 123 |   108 549 |
covered nodes |  200 | 1 357 | 2 821 | 7 031 | 42 658 | 524 530 | 2 276 755 |

To be a bit more concrete, lets take a very pathological case as an example. We
are doing discovery from a copy of Mozilla-try to a more recent version of
mozilla-unified. Mozilla-unified heads are unknown to the mozilla-try repo and
there are over 1 million "missing" changesets. (the discovery is "local" to
avoid network interference)

Without this change, the discovery:
- last 1858 seconds (31 minutes),
- does 1700 round trip,
- asking about 340 000 nodes.

With this change, the discovery:
- last 218 seconds (3 minutes, 38 seconds a -88% improvement),
- does 94 round trip (-94%),
- asking about 344 211 nodes (+1%).

Of course, this is an extreme case (and 3 minutes is still slow). However this
give a good example of how this sample size increase act as a safety net
catching any bad situations.

We could image a steeper increase than 5%. For example 10% would give the
following number:

round trip    |    1 |     5 |    10 |     20 |     50  |        75 |        100 |
sample size   |  200 |   321 |   514 |  1 326 |  23 060 |   249 812 |  2 706 594 |
covered nodes |  200 | 1 541 | 3 690 | 12 671 | 251 871 | 2 746 254 | 29 770 966 |

In parallel, it is useful to understand these pathological cases and improve
them. However the current change provides a general purpose safety net to smooth
the impact of pathological cases.

To avoid issue with older http server, the increase in sample size only occurs
if the protocol has not limit on command argument size.

===================
Mercurial Rust Code
===================

This directory contains various Rust code for the Mercurial project.

The top-level ``Cargo.toml`` file defines a workspace containing
all primary Mercurial crates.

Building
========

To build the Rust components::

   $ cargo build

If you prefer a non-debug / release configuration::

   $ cargo build --release

Features
--------

The following Cargo features are available:

localdev (default)
   Produce files that work with an in-source-tree build.

   In this mode, the build finds and uses a ``python2.7`` binary from
   ``PATH``. The ``hg`` binary assumes it runs from ``rust/target/<target>hg``
   and it finds Mercurial files at ``dirname($0)/../../../``.

Build Mechanism
---------------

The produced ``hg`` binary is *bound* to a CPython installation. The
binary links against and loads a CPython library that is discovered
at build time (by a ``build.rs`` Cargo build script). The Python
standard library defined by this CPython installation is also used.

Finding the appropriate CPython installation to use is done by
the ``python27-sys`` crate's ``build.rs``. Its search order is::

1. ``PYTHON_SYS_EXECUTABLE`` environment variable.
2. ``python`` executable on ``PATH``
3. ``python2`` executable on ``PATH``
4. ``python2.7`` executable on ``PATH``

Additional verification of the found Python will be performed by our
``build.rs`` to ensure it meets Mercurial's requirements.

Details about the build-time configured Python are built into the
produced ``hg`` binary. This means that a built ``hg`` binary is only
suitable for a specific, well-defined role. These roles are controlled
by Cargo features (see above).

Running
=======

The ``hgcli`` crate produces an ``hg`` binary. You can run this binary
via ``cargo run``::

   $ cargo run --manifest-path hgcli/Cargo.toml

Or directly::

   $ target/debug/hg
   $ target/release/hg

You can also run the test harness with this binary::

   $ ./run-tests.py --with-hg ../rust/target/debug/hg

.. note::

   Integration with the test harness is still preliminary. Remember to
   ``cargo build`` after changes because the test harness doesn't yet
   automatically build Rust code.