xrevlog: experimental reimplementation of revlog in C

Greg Ward greg at gerg.ca
Mon Nov 15 21:36:05 CST 2010


I have finally fixed all the bugs in xrevlog revealed by my first
round of performance testing.  (Amazing what turns up when you try to
decompress [nearly] all of the revisions in a large revlog.)  At any
rate, the performance test now runs without segfaults on a couple of
fair-sized revlogs.

So far I've done 2 runs on 2 revlogs: perftest.py using the Mercurial
Python API and perftest.c using xrevlog against the changelogs from
Mercurial (12k revs) and our large repo at work (113k revs).

Performance testing involves four tasks:

1) openclose: open the revlog and close (or discard) it
2) readindex: open the revlog and read the entire index (dumpindex
without bothering stdout)
3) readtip: open the revlog and read the data for the tip revision (hg tip)
4) readdata: open the revlog and read a random 500 entries in forward order

Note that task 4 has changed since my last run.  I changed it from 10%
of the entries to 500 of them to 1) make it go faster and 2) reduce
variability between medium and large revlogs.  Now the difference
should be down to factors inherent to the size of the revlog (or
that's the theory).

Each task was run 50 times, and then I took the min() of 3 repeats of
that.  In Python I used timeit, and in C I reimplemented the same
algorithm.  All times are the time for 50 iterations of a particular
task, in milliseconds.

And now the results.

Python/Mercurial, medium changelog (12k revs):
  openclose     min   1496.8 ms
  readindex     min   6146.1 ms
  readtip       min   1521.0 ms
  readdata      min   3941.5 ms

C/xrevlog, medium changelog (12k revs):
  openclose     min      1.2 ms
  readindex     min    233.9 ms    # 26x faster
  readtip       min      3.4 ms    # 450x faster
  readdata      min    699.6 ms    # 5.6x faster

Python/Mercurial, large changelog (113k revs):
  openclose     min    372.2 ms
  readindex     min 147255.4 ms
  readtip       min    483.2 ms
  readdata      min  26509.5 ms

C/xrevlog, large changelog (113k revs):
  openclose     min      1.4 ms
  readindex     min   2057.8 ms    # 71x faster
  readtip       min      5.7 ms    # 85x faster,
  readdata      min    923.6 ms    # 27x faster

Something is fishy with reading the whole index in Python.  It should
be 10x slower for a 10x larger revlog, but it's more than 20x slower.
I'm pretty sure there was no swapping; I had >1 GB of free physical
memory during all the runs.  (I went to single user mode, started up a
few ttys, and flushed all kernel caches before starting.)

Oh yeah, the test system is a 7-year-old laptop with a 1400 MHz
Pentium M, 1.5 GB of RAM, a vanilla IDE hard disk, and ~500 MB of
swap.  Hardly a killer performance machine.  ;-)

Also of note:
  * this is still using mmap() -- after Matt's feedback, I want to try
a non-mmap() version, but I wanted to fix all the bugs and get new
numbers first
  * one obvious optimization to try: I'm malloc()'ing a fresh buffer
for gzip to decompress every rev into -- should probably alloc it once
for the whole revlog and resize as needed. I think.
  * I'm still not handling the node ID -> revnum mapping, which I
think will force me to read the whole index into memory much more
often -- so I'll lose some advantage there, I think

Greg


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