Re: Performance issue of 'git branch'

On Wed 22.Jul'09 at 17:21:48 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

When have you last repacked the repository?

Last week or so, with 'git repack -d -a'

quoted

[mafra@Pilar:linux-2.6]$ ls .git/refs/heads/
dev-private  master  sparse

which, apart from "master", are the last branches that I created.

Ok, this actually means that you _have_ repacked the repo, and the rest of 
the branches are all nicely packed in .git/packed-refs.

Yes, now I saw the other branches inside packed-refs.

But that four _second_ lstat() is really disgusting.

Let me guess: if you do a "ls -ld .git/refs/heads" you get a very big 
directory, despite it only having three entries in it. 

[mafra@Pilar:linux-2.6]$ ls -ld .git/refs/heads
drwxr-xr-x 2 mafra mafra 4096 2009-07-22 23:01 .git/refs/heads/

And your filesystem 
doesn't have name hashing enabled, so searching for a non-existent file 
involves looking through _all_ of the empty slots.

I use ext3 without changing any defaults that I know of (I simply compile
and boot the kernel of the day), and I have no idea if name hashing
is enabled here.

Try this:

	git pack-refs --all

	rmdir .git/refs/heads
	rmdir .git/refs/tags

	mkdir .git/refs/heads
	mkdir .git/refs/tags

and see if it magically speeds up.

It didn't change things, unfortunately.

After 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' it still takes too long,

1248310449.693085 munmap(0x7f50bcd11000, 164) = 0
1248310449.693187 lstat(".git/refs/heads/sparse", 0x7fff618c0960) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
1248310449.719112 lstat(".git/refs/heads/stern", 0x7fff618c0960) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
1248310453.014041 fstat(1, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0620, st_rdev=makedev(136, 3), ...}) = 0
1248310453.014183 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f50bcd11000

Perhaps I should delete the "stern" branch, but I would like to learn why
it is slowing things, because it also happened before (in fact it is always
like this, afaicr)

Do you have another theory? (now .git/refs/heads is empty)

Thanks,
Carlos