view tests/test-issue1306.t @ 47802:de2e04fe4897

hgwebdir: avoid systematic full garbage collection

Forcing a systematic full garbage collection upon each request
can serioulsy harm performance. This is reported as
https://bz.mercurial-scm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6075

With this change we're performing the full collection according
to a new setting, `experimental.web.full-garbage-collection-rate`.
The default value is 1, which doesn't change the behavior and will
allow us to test on real use cases. If the value is 0, no full garbage
collection occurs.

Regardless of the value of the setting, a partial garbage collection
still occurs upon each request (not attempting to collect objects from
the oldest generation). This should be enough to take care of
reference cycles that have been created by the last request
(assessment of this requires changing the setting, not to be 1).

In my experience chasing memory leaks in Mercurial servers,
the full collection never reclaimed any memory, but this is with
Python 3 and biased towards small repositories.

On the other hand, as explained in the Python developer docs [1],
frequent full collections are very harmful in terms of performance if
lots of objects survive the collection, and hence stay in the
oldest generation. Note that `gc.collect()` is indeed trying to
collect the oldest generation [2]. This happens usually in two cases:

- unwanted lingering objects (i.e., an actual memory leak that
  the GC cannot do anything about). Sadly, we have lots of those
  these days.
- desireable long-term objects, typically in caches (not inner caches
  carried by repositories, which should be collected with them). This
  is a subject of interest for the Heptapod project.

In short, the flat rate that this change still permits is
probably a bad idea in most cases, and the default value can
be tweaked later on (or even be set to 0) according to experiments
in the wild.

The test is inspired from test-hgwebdir-paths.py

[1] https://devguide.python.org/garbage_collector/#collecting-the-oldest-generation
[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/gc.html#gc.collect

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D11204

https://bz.mercurial-scm.org/1306

Initialize remote repo with branches:

  $ hg init remote
  $ cd remote

  $ echo a > a
  $ hg ci -Ama
  adding a

  $ hg branch br
  marked working directory as branch br
  (branches are permanent and global, did you want a bookmark?)
  $ hg ci -Amb

  $ echo c > c
  $ hg ci -Amc
  adding c

  $ hg log
  changeset:   2:ae3d9c30ec50
  branch:      br
  tag:         tip
  user:        test
  date:        Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
  summary:     c
  
  changeset:   1:3f7f930ca414
  branch:      br
  user:        test
  date:        Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
  summary:     b
  
  changeset:   0:cb9a9f314b8b
  user:        test
  date:        Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
  summary:     a
  

  $ cd ..

Try cloning -r branch:

  $ hg clone -rbr remote local1
  adding changesets
  adding manifests
  adding file changes
  added 3 changesets with 2 changes to 2 files
  new changesets cb9a9f314b8b:ae3d9c30ec50
  updating to branch br
  2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

  $ hg -R local1 parents
  changeset:   2:ae3d9c30ec50
  branch:      br
  tag:         tip
  user:        test
  date:        Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
  summary:     c
  

Try cloning -rother clone#branch:

  $ hg clone -r0 remote#br local2
  adding changesets
  adding manifests
  adding file changes
  added 3 changesets with 2 changes to 2 files
  new changesets cb9a9f314b8b:ae3d9c30ec50
  updating to branch default
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

  $ hg -R local2 parents
  changeset:   0:cb9a9f314b8b
  user:        test
  date:        Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
  summary:     a
  

Try cloning -r1 clone#branch:

  $ hg clone -r1 remote#br local3
  adding changesets
  adding manifests
  adding file changes
  added 3 changesets with 2 changes to 2 files
  new changesets cb9a9f314b8b:ae3d9c30ec50
  updating to branch br
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

  $ hg -R local3 parents
  changeset:   1:3f7f930ca414
  branch:      br
  user:        test
  date:        Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
  summary:     b