Re: [PATCH v1] read_index_from(): Skip verification of the cache entry order to speed index loading

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

It should be easy enough to check that; the patch below implements it.
I couldn't measure any speedup with it running "git ls-files >/dev/null"
on linux.git (60k files). But nor could I get any by dropping the check
entirely.

I would expect that the speedup (due to possible cache effect)
wouldn't be measurable if the overhead of the existing check itself
is unmeasuably not-expensive.  No suprise here.

This is mostly just a curiosity to me. For the record, I have no real
problem with dropping this kind of on-disk data-structure validation
when it's expensive. After all, we do not check the sort on pack .idx
files on each run (nor pack sha1 checksums, etc) because it's too
expensive to do so.

Yes, I agree with that stance, too.  If this were expensive in the
overall picture to be measurable, I think we are OK omitting when
the index is read, especially if we make sure we are not writing out
nonsense trees out of it.  Local damage to the index is very
contained as long as we do not spread breakages to trees and
commits.