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  • Arun Kulshreshtha's avatar
    bisect: avoid copying ancestor list for non-merge commits · c6a1beba27e9
    Arun Kulshreshtha authored
    During a bisection, hg needs to compute a list of all ancestors for every
    candidate commit. This is accomplished via a bottom-up traversal of the set of
    candidates, during which each revision's ancestor list is populated using the
    ancestor list of its parent(s). Previously, this involved copying the entire
    list, which could be very long in if the bisection range was large.
    
    To help improve this, we can observe that each candidate commit is visited
    exactly once, at which point its ancestor list is copied into its children's
    lists and then dropped. In the case of non-merge commits, a commit's ancestor
    list consists exactly of its parent's list plus itself. This means that we can
    trivially reuse the parent's existing list for one of its non-merge children,
    which avoids copying entirely if that commit is the parent's only child. This
    makes bisections over linear ranges of commits much faster.
    
    During some informal testing in the large publicly-available `mozilla-central`
    repository, this noticeably sped up bisections over large ranges of history:
    
    Setup:
      $ cd mozilla-central
      $ hg bisect --reset
      $ hg bisect --good 0
      $ hg log -r tip -T '{rev}\n'
      628417
    
    Test:
      $ time hg bisect --bad tip --noupdate
    
    Before:
      real    3m35.927s
      user    3m35.553s
      sys     0m0.319s
    
    After:
      real    1m41.142s
      user    1m40.810s
      sys     0m0.285s
    c6a1beba27e9