bdiff: improve worst case behavior by 100x. on 5.8MB (244.000 lines) text file with similar lines, hash before this change made diff against empty file take 75 seconds. this change improves performance to 0.6 seconds. result is that clone of smallish repo (137MB) with some files like this takes 1 minute instead of 10 minutes. common case of diff is 10% slower now, probably because of worse cache locality. but diff does not affect overall performance in common case (less than 1% of runtime is in diff when it is working ok), so this tradeoff looks good.

#!/bin/sh

mkdir t
cd t
hg init
echo import > port
hg add port
hg commit -m 0 -u spam -d '0 0'
echo export >> port
hg commit -m 1 -u eggs -d '1 0'
echo export > port
echo vaportight >> port
echo 'import/export' >> port
hg commit -m 2 -u spam -d '2 0'
echo 'import/export' >> port
hg commit -m 3 -u eggs -d '3 0'
head -n 3 port > port1
mv port1 port
hg commit -m 4 -u spam -d '4 0'
hg grep port port
echo 'FIXME: history is wrong here'
hg grep --all -nu port port
hg grep import port