Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/6] object-file: extract logic to approximate object count

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:58:11 +0100

On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 01:47:13PM +0100, Toon Claes wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > In "builtin/gc.c" we have some logic that checks whether we need to
> > repack objects. This is done by counting the number of objects that we
> > have and checking whether it exceeds a certain threshold. We don't
> > really need an accurate object count though, which is why we only
> > open a single object diretcroy shard and then extrapolate from there.
> 
> s/diretcroy/directory/

Thanks, fixed locally.

> > diff --git a/object-file.c b/object-file.c
> > index a3ff7f586c..da67e3c9ff 100644
> > --- a/object-file.c
> > +++ b/object-file.c
> > @@ -1868,6 +1868,47 @@ int odb_source_loose_for_each_object(struct odb_source *source,
> >  					     NULL, NULL, &data);
> >  }
> >  
> > +int odb_source_loose_approximate_object_count(struct odb_source *source,
> > +					      unsigned long *out)
> > +{
> > +	const unsigned hexsz = source->odb->repo->hash_algo->hexsz - 2;
> > +	unsigned long count = 0;
> > +	struct dirent *ent;
> > +	char *path = NULL;
> > +	DIR *dir = NULL;
> > +	int ret;
> > +
> > +	path = xstrfmt("%s/17", source->path);
> > +
> > +	dir = opendir(path);
> > +	if (!dir) {
> > +		if (errno == ENOENT) {
> > +			*out = 0;
> > +			ret = 0;
> > +			goto out;
> > +		}
> > +
> > +		ret = error_errno("cannot open object shard '%s'", path);
> > +		goto out;
> > +	}
> > +
> > +	while ((ent = readdir(dir)) != NULL) {
> > +		if (strspn(ent->d_name, "0123456789abcdef") != hexsz ||
> > +		    ent->d_name[hexsz] != '\0')
> > +			continue;
> > +		count++;
> > +	}
> > +
> > +	*out = count * 256;
> 
> This makes the number way larger, but I don't think we need to worry
> getting anywhere near ULONG_MAX, because I would expect to have Git
> coming to a grind way before that happens (not to mention filesystems
> would get unhappy about it too).

Yup. Even if `unsigned long` was 32 bits that would be >128 million
loose objects in a single directory. I agree that this is probably going
to make some things in Git unhappy. So we could have overflow checks
here, but I'm not sure it's worth it.

Thanks!

Patrick