Recently (the past few years actually) we’ve been experiencing that Mercurial has problems scaling to it’s activity. Here are some statistics for example:
24550 Mercurial heads (this is reset every few months) Head count correlated with the degraded performance 4.3 GB in size, 203509 files without a working copy One of the methods we’re attempting is to modify try so that each push is not a head, but is instead a bundle that can be applied cleanly to any [mozilla-central](https://hg.
We have quite a bit of infrastructure around this including Tinderbox Pushlog (TBPL) and more. This post deals with the infrastructure and problem we face while trying to scale the ’try’ repository.
A few statistics:
The try repository currently has 17943 heads. These heads are never removed. The try repository is about 3.6 GB in size. Due to Mercurial’s on-wire HTTP protocol, this number of heads causes HTTP cloning to fail There are roughly 81000 HTTP requests to try per day To fix problems (mentioned below), the try repository is deleted and re-cloned from mozilla-central every few months There are a number of problems associated with such a repository.