view CONTRIBUTORS @ 29014:f1ca249696ed stable

bdiff: balance recursion to avoid quadratic behavior (issue4704)

For highly structured files like JSON or XML dumps with large numbers
of duplicate lines (eg braces) and isolated matching lines, bdiff
could find large numbers of equally good spans. Because it prefers
earlier matches, this would result in pathologically unbalance
recursion that resulted in quadratic performance.

This patch makes it prefer matches closer to the middle that tend to
balance recursion. This change improves the speed of a pathological
test case from 1100s to 9s.

Included is a smaller test that has a roughly 50x safety margin on the
performance it accepts. It's likely to fail on pure builds because
difflib also has a recursion-balancing problem.

[This file is here for historical purposes, all recent contributors
should appear in the changelog directly]

Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at suse.de>
Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de>
Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijack at libero.it>
Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix at mulix.org>
Mikael Berthe <mikael at lilotux.net>
Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com>
Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>
Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr>
Jake Edge <jake at edge2.net>
Michael Fetterman <michael.fetterman at intel.com>
Edouard Gomez <ed.gomez at free.fr>
Eric Hopper <hopper at omnifarious.org>
Alecs King <alecsk at gmail.com>
Volker Kleinfeld <Volker.Kleinfeld at gmx.de>
Vadim Lebedev <vadim at mbdsys.com>
Christopher Li <hg at chrisli.org>
Chris Mason <mason at suse.com>
Colin McMillen <mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu>
Wojciech Milkowski <wmilkowski at interia.pl>
Chad Netzer <chad.netzer at gmail.com>
Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
Vicent Seguí Pascual <vseguip at gmail.com>
Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
Nguyen Anh Quynh <aquynh at gmail.com>
Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr>
Alexander Schremmer <alex at alexanderweb.de>
Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home.net>
Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jeffpc at optonline.net>
Kevin Smith <yarcs at qualitycode.com>
TK Soh <teekaysoh at yahoo.com>
Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm at gorzow.mm.pl>
Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net>
K Thananchayan <thananck at yahoo.com>
Andrew Thompson <andrewkt at aktzero.com>
Michael S. Tsirkin <mst at mellanox.co.il>
Rafael Villar Burke <pachi at mmn-arquitectos.com>
Tristan Wibberley <tristan at wibberley.org>
Mark Williamson <mark.williamson at cl.cam.ac.uk>