README.rst
author Georges Racinet <georges.racinet@octobus.net>
Fri, 23 Apr 2021 18:30:53 +0200
branchstable
changeset 47010 76ae43d5b1db
parent 46756 c5912e35d06d
permissions -rw-r--r--
repoview: fix memory leak of filtered repo classes The leak occurs in long-running server processes with extensions, and is measured at 110kB per request. Before this change, the contents of the `_filteredrepotypes` cache are not properly garbage collected, despite it begin a `WeakKeyDictionary`. Extensions have a tendency to generate a new repository class for each `localrepo` instantiation. Server processes based on `hgwebdir_mod` will instantiate a new `localrepo` for each HTTP request that involves a repository. As a result, with a testing process that repeatedly opens a repository with several extensions activated (`topic` notably among them), we see a steady increase in resident memory of 110kB per repository instantiation before this change. This is also true, if we call `gc.collect()` at each instantiation, like `hgwebdir_mod` does, or not. The cause of the leak is that the *values* aren't weak references. This change uses `weakref.ref` for the values, and this makes in our measurements the resident size increase drop to 5kB per repository instantiation, with no explicit call of `gc.collect()` at all. There is currently no reason to believe that this remaining leak of 5kB is related to or even due to Mercurial core. We've also seen evidence that `ui.ui` instances weren't properly garbage collected before the change (with the change, they are). This could explain why the figures are relatively high. In theory, the collection of weak references could lead to much more misses in the cache, so we measured the impact on the original case that was motivation for introducing that cache in 7e89bd0cfb86 (see also issue5043): `hg convert` of the mozilla-central repository. The bad news here is that there is a major memory leak there, both with and without the present changeset. There were no more cache misses, and we could see no more memory leak with this change: the resident size after importing roughly 100000 changesets was at 12.4GB before, and 12.5GB after. The small increase is mentioned for completeness only, and we believe that it should be ignored, at least as long as the main leak isn't fixed. At less than 1% of the main leak, even finding out whether it is merely noise would be wasteful. Original context where this was spotted and first mitigated: https://foss.heptapod.net/heptapod/heptapod/-/issues/466 The leak reduction was also obtained in Heptapod inner HTTP server, which amounts to the same as `hgwebdir_mod` for these questions. The measurements done with Python 3.9, similar figures seen with 3.8. More work on our side would be needed to give measurements with 2.7, because of testing server process does not support it.

Mercurial
=========

Mercurial is a fast, easy to use, distributed revision control tool
for software developers.

Basic install::

 $ make            # see install targets
 $ make install    # do a system-wide install
 $ hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
 $ hg              # see help

Running without installing::

 $ make local      # build for inplace usage
 $ ./hg --version  # should show the latest version

See https://mercurial-scm.org/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.

Notes for packagers
===================

Mercurial ships a copy of the python-zstandard sources. This is used to
provide support for zstd compression and decompression functionality. The
module is not intended to be replaced by the plain python-zstandard nor
is it intended to use a system zstd library. Patches can result in hard
to diagnose errors and are explicitly discouraged as unsupported
configuration.