Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 4/5] get_sha1: speed up ambiguous 40-hex test

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2014 10:25:44 -0800

Michael Haggerty <[email-masked]> writes:

> It's not only racy WRT other processes.  If the current git process
> would create a new reference, it wouldn't be reflected in the cache.
>
> It's true that the main ref_cache doesn't invalidate itself
> automatically either when a new reference is created, so it's not really
> a fair complaint.  However, as we add places where the cache is
> invalidated, it is easy to overlook this cache that is stuck in static
> variables within a function definition and it is impossible to
> invalidate it.  Might it not be better to attach the cache to the
> ref_cache structure instead, and couple its lifetime to that object?
>
> Alternatively, the cache could be created and managed on the caller
> side, since the caller would know when the cache would have to be
> invalidated.  Also, different callers are likely to have different
> performance characteristics.  It is unlikely that the time to initialize
> the cache will be amortized in most cases; in fact, "rev-list --stdin"
> might be the *only* plausible use case.

True.

> Regarding the overall strategy: you gather all refnames that could be
> confused with an SHA-1 into a sha1_array, then later look up SHA-1s in
> the array to see if they are ambiguous.  This is a very special-case
> optimization for SHA-1s.
>
> I wonder whether another approach would gain almost the same amount of
> performance but be more general.  We could change dwim_ref() (or a
> version of it?) to read its data out of a ref_cache instead of going to
> disk every time.  Then, at the cost of populating the relevant parts of
> the ref_cache once, we would have fast dwim_ref() calls for all strings.

If opendir-readdir to grab only the names (but not values) of many
refs is a lot faster than stat-open-read a handful of dwim-ref
locations for a given name, that optimization might be worthwhile,
but I think that requires an update to read_loose_refs() not to
read_ref_full() and the users of refs API to instead lazily resolve
the refs, no?

If I ask for five names (say 'maint', 'master', 'next', 'pu',
'jch'), the current code will do 5 dwim_ref()s, each of which will
consult 6 locations with resolve_ref_unsafe(), totalling 30 calls to
resolve_ref_unsafe(), each of which in turn is essentially an open
followed by either an return on ENOENT or a read.  So 30 opens and 5
reads in total.

With your lazy ref_cache scheme, instead we would enumerate all the
loose ones in the same 6 directories (e.g. refs/tags/, refs/heads),
so 6 opendir()s with as many readdir()s as I have loose refs, plus
we open-read them in read_loose_refs() called from get_ref_dir()
with the current ref_cache code.  For me, "find .git/refs/heads"
gives 500+ lines of output, which suggests that using the ref_cache
mechanism for dwim_ref() may not be a huge win, unless it is updated
to be extremely lazy, and readdir()s turns out to be extremely less
heavier than open-read.  Also it is unlikely that the cost to
initialize the cache is amortized to be a net win unless we are
dealing with tons of dwim_ref()s.