Subject: Re: repo.or.cz renovated

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:34:23 -0400

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 07:10:15PM +0100, Petr Baudis wrote:
> Actually, it was overwhelmed to so much by its success but by lack of
> good maintenance. ;-) I gave it some love again for the past week and
> the improvement was, well, overwhelming. :-)
> 
> I finally fixed tons of failures and broken repositories, and most
> importantly repacked some of the big repositories with object databases
> in pretty horrid shape. The effect has been immense, having everything
> in database of 1/3 the size and single big pack drastically reduced the
> I/O load.

Are you making sure that repositories which are forks off of some
parent repository are using objects/info/alternates to share objects?
(If so you have to be careful when you prune not to drop objects, but
it can make a huge difference in disk utilization and I/O bandwidth).

At least for master.kernel.org, and for those git repositories which I
own, I make a point of periodically logging in and running git gc,
copying over the object packs so I can do a prune operation safely,
etc.  --- and I suspect most of the master.kernel.org git users do
something similar.  On repo.or.cz we don't have shell access, so the
project administrators can't do that for you.

> So for anyone running a hosting site, make sure your repositories are
> nicely packed. It makes huge difference to the I/O load!

It seems that a Really Good Idea would be do the the packing and
pruning via cron scripts that run during the off hours...

> My current plan is to have a [Search project] box at the front page,
> together with direct link to 'show all'. Other than that, what makes
> sense to display on the front page? I think recently added projects (age
> < 1 week) for sure. I'm not so sure about recently changed projects -
> maybe it is better to keep the front page cruft-free.

There are plenty of ways which sites like freshmeat and sourceforge
have come up to make it easy to browse a large number of software
projects.  One way that might make sense is Sourceforge's Software Map
(i.e., http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/).

					- Ted