wireproto: define frame to represent progress updates Today, a long-running operation on a server may run without any sign of progress on the client. This can lead to the conclusion that the server has hung or the connection has dropped. In fact, connections can and do time out due to inactivity. And a long-running server operation can result in the connection dropping prematurely because no data is being sent! While we're inventing the new wire protocol, let's provide a mechanism for communicating progress on potentially expensive server-side events. We introduce a new frame type that conveys "progress" updates. This frame type essentially holds the data required to formulate a ``ui.progress()`` call. We only define the frame right now. Implementing it will be a bit of work since there is no analog to progress frames in the existing wire protocol. We'll need to teach the ui object to write to the wire protocol, etc. The use of a CBOR map may seem wasteful, as this will encode key names in every frame. This *is* wasteful. However, maps are extensible. And the intent is to always use compression via streams. Compression will make the overhead negligible since repeated strings will be mostly eliminated over the wire. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2902

wireproto: syntax for encoding CBOR into frames We just vendored a library for encoding and decoding the CBOR data format. While the intent of that vendor was to support state files, CBOR is really a nice data format. It is extensible and compact. I've been feeling dirty inventing my own data formats for frame payloads. While custom formats can always beat out a generic format, there is a cost to be paid in terms of implementation, comprehension, etc. CBOR is compact enough that I'm not too worried about efficiency loss. I think the benefits of using a standardized format outweigh rolling our own formats. So I plan to make heavy use of CBOR in the wire protocol going forward. This commit introduces support for encoding CBOR data in frame payloads to our function to make a frame from a human string. We do need to employ some low-level Python code in order to evaluate a string as a Python expression. But other than that, this should hopefully be pretty straightforward. Unit tests for this function have been added. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2948

wireproto: explicit API to create outgoing streams It is better to create outgoing streams through the reactor so the reactor knows about what streams are active and can track them accordingly. Test output changes slightly because frames from subsequent responses no longer have the "stream begin" stream flag set because the stream is now used across all responses. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2947

wireproto: add streams to frame-based protocol Previously, the frame-based protocol was just a series of frames, with each frame associated with a request ID. In order to scale the protocol, we'll want to enable the use of compression. While it is possible to enable compression at the socket/pipe level, this has its disadvantages. The big one is it undermines the point of frames being standalone, atomic units that can be read and written: if you add compression above the framing protocol, you are back to having a stream-based protocol as opposed to something frame-based. So in order to preserve frames, compression needs to occur at the frame payload level. Compressing each frame's payload individually will limit compression ratios because the window size of the compressor will be limited by the max frame size, which is 32-64kb as currently defined. It will also add CPU overhead, as it is more efficient for compressors to operate on fewer, larger blocks of data than more, smaller blocks. So compressing each frame independently is out. This means we need to compress each frame's payload as if it is part of a larger stream. The simplest approach is to have 1 stream per connection. This could certainly work. However, it has disadvantages (documented below). We could also have 1 stream per RPC/command invocation. (This is the model HTTP/2 goes with.) This also has disadvantages. The main disadvantage to one global stream is that it has the very real potential to create CPU bottlenecks doing compression. Networks are only getting faster and the performance of single CPU cores has been relatively flat. Newer compression formats like zstandard offer better CPU cycle efficiency than predecessors like zlib. But it still all too common to saturate your CPU with compression overhead long before you saturate the network pipe. The main disadvantage with streams per request is that you can't reap the benefits of the compression context for multiple requests. For example, if you send 1000 RPC requests (or HTTP/2 requests for that matter), the response to each would have its own compression context. The overall size of the raw responses would be larger because compression contexts wouldn't be able to reference data from another request or response. The approach for streams as implemented in this commit is to support N streams per connection and for streams to potentially span requests and responses. As explained by the added internals docs, this facilitates servers and clients delegating independent streams and compression to independent threads / CPU cores. This helps alleviate the CPU bottleneck of compression. This design also allows compression contexts to be reused across requests/responses. This can result in improved compression ratios and less overhead for compressors and decompressors having to build new contexts. Another feature that was defined was the ability for individual frames within a stream to declare whether that individual frame's payload uses the content encoding (read: compression) defined by the stream. The idea here is that some servers may serve data from a combination of caches and dynamic resolution. Data coming from caches may be pre-compressed. We want to facilitate servers being able to essentially stream bytes from caches to the wire with minimal overhead. Being able to mix and match with frames are compressed within a stream enables these types of advanced server functionality. This commit defines the new streams mechanism. Basic code for supporting streams in frames has been added. But that code is seriously lacking and doesn't fully conform to the defined protocol. For example, we don't close any streams. And support for content encoding within streams is not yet implemented. The change was rather invasive and I didn't think it would be reasonable to implement the entire feature in a single commit. For the record, I would have loved to reuse an existing multiplexing protocol to build the new wire protocol on top of. However, I couldn't find a protocol that offers the performance and scaling characteristics that I desired. Namely, it should support multiple compression contexts to facilitate scaling out to multiple CPU cores and compression contexts should be able to live longer than single RPC requests. HTTP/2 *almost* fits the bill. But the semantics of HTTP message exchange state that streams can only live for a single request-response. We /could/ tunnel on top of HTTP/2 streams and frames with HEADER and DATA frames. But there's no guarantee that HTTP/2 libraries and proxies would allow us to use HTTP/2 streams and frames without the HTTP message exchange semantics defined in RFC 7540 Section 8. Other RPC protocols like gRPC tunnel are built on top of HTTP/2 and thus preserve its semantics of stream per RPC invocation. Even QUIC does this. We could attempt to invent a higher-level stream that spans HTTP/2 streams. But this would be violating HTTP/2 because there is no guarantee that HTTP/2 streams are routed to the same server. The best we can do - which is what this protocol does - is shoehorn all request and response data into a single HTTP message and create streams within. At that point, we've defined a Content-Type in HTTP parlance. It just so happens our media type can also work as a standalone, stream-based protocol, without leaning on HTTP or similar protocol. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2907