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Improve performance when rendering diff lines.

Review Request #5555 — Created Feb. 27, 2014 and submitted — Latest diff uploaded

Information

Review Board
release-2.0.x
00d477d...

Reviewers

This makes a number of optimizations to our diff rendering process:

  1. Some unnecessary string comparisons from the diff_lines template tag
    have been simplified, so that we're only ever comparing one string.
    Small change, but one that should add up over the course of diffs.
    From performance testing, this appears to be roughly 30% faster
    overall.

  2. We were checking if we needed to highlight regions for every
    single line, not just replace lines. This meant we did empty string
    checks, length checks, and string comparisons for every single line.
    These also added up, even though it only ever triggered the
    highlight region code for replace lines.

Instead of all this work, we now check if it's a replace line
up-front, preventing all the other checks.

  1. Highlighting regions for a replace line is now twice as fast.
    Instead of parsing every character and keeping track of state,
    we're making use of str.find, which is much faster. We're also
    grabbing ranges of a string at a time, and reducing accesses to
    indexes of regions.

All unit tests pass. Viewed some diffs, and they worked.

Ran a series of performance tests. The following correspond to the itemized
tasks above:

  1. Made a test script for the comparisons and ran it 2,000,000 times.
    The old code took 1.2 seconds. The new code took 0.84 seconds.

  2. Made a test script simulating comparisons for 200 equal lines, 50 inserts,
    20 deletes, and 40 replaces. Ran this 20,000 times. Without the "replace"
    check, it took 2.65 seconds. With the check, it took 1.85 seconds.

  3. Another test script for highlightregion. Ran it on a fairly standard set
    of replaces, 200,000 times. The old code took 6.52 seconds. The new code
    took 3.38 seconds.