In my last release I had put out an hg annotate fix for the gitweb_mozilla theme. Dirkjan Ochtman, a Mercurial Project developer, noticed my release and asked me to come up with a similar fix for the Mercurial Project’s paper theme. I decided to take up the task and see if I could get similar results for the paper theme as I did with gitweb_mozilla.

The paper theme uses a HUGE table to display the results just like gitweb_mozilla. I tested the current version of the theme using a large 10,000 line cpp file. It gave me a loading time of ~30sec, which is ~10sec longer than gitweb_mozilla.

The following is the code to fix annotate:

map

annotateline = '<div class="l#parity#"><div class="codeauthor"><a href="{url}annotate/{node|short}/{file|urlescape}{sessionvars%urlparameter}#{targetline}" title="{node|short}: {desc|escape|firstline}">{author|user}@{rev}</a></div><a class="codeline" href="#{lineid}" id="{lineid}">{linenumber}</a>{line|escape}</div>'

style-paper.css

div.codeauthor { 
    display:inline-block; 
	width:16ch; 
	text-align: right; 
	color:#999999; 
	text-decoration:none;
	margin-right: 25em;
} 
a.codeline { 
    color:#999999; 
	text-decoration:none; 
	margin:0 10px; 
}                                   
div.l0 {
    background-color:#f6f6f0;
}                                                                    
div.l0, div.l1 { 
    display:block; 
}
pre.completecodeline { 
    font-size: 90%;
	line-height:1.4em; 
	font-family: monospace;
    white-space: pre;
}
div.headrev {
    float: left;
	margin-right: 32em;
	margin-left: 8em;
	font-size: 90%;
	font-weight: bolder;
}
div.headline {
	font-weight: bolder;
	font-size: 90%;
}

I changed the code (see above) and tested annotate again to examine the difference in loading time. I got some surprising results. The reduction in file size was not significant at all. The fix for gitweb_mozilla brought down the file size by 25%. However, in this case the reduction in file size wasn’t nearly as significant. Also the reduction in loading time for gitweb_mozilla was ~15sec but for the paper theme the loading time was only reduced by ~12secs. Currently, on my machine the loading time has gone down from ~30secs to ~18secs.

The speed increase isn’t as signficant for the paper theme as it was for gitweb_mozilla. Why is that? I don’t exactly know. Obviously there are other factors coming into play that aren’t allowing a similar speed boost. Nonetheless, there is a noticeble increase in loading times.