Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.19.0-rc0

Jeff King wrote:

Here's the patch. For some reason my numbers aren't quite as large as
they were yesterday (I was very careful to keep the system unloaded
today, whereas yesterday I was doing a few other things, so perhaps that
is the difference).

-- >8 --
Subject: [PATCH] hashcmp: assert constant hash size

Prior to 509f6f62a4 (cache: update object ID functions for
the_hash_algo, 2018-07-16), hashcmp() called memcmp() with a
constant size of 20 bytes. Some compilers were able to turn
that into a few quad-word comparisons, which is faster than
actually calling memcmp().

In 509f6f62a4, we started using the_hash_algo->rawsz
instead. Even though this will always be 20, the compiler
doesn't know that while inlining hashcmp() and ends up just
generating a call to memcmp().

Eventually we'll have to deal with multiple hash sizes, but
for the upcoming v2.19, we can restore some of the original
performance by asserting on the size. That gives the
compiler enough information to know that the memcmp will
always be called with a length of 20, and it performs the
same optimization.

Here are numbers for p0001.2 run against linux.git on a few
versions. This is using -O2 with gcc 8.2.0.

  Test     v2.18.0             v2.19.0-rc0               HEAD
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  0001.2:  34.24(33.81+0.43)   34.83(34.42+0.40) +1.7%   33.90(33.47+0.42) -1.0%

You can see that v2.19 is a little slower than v2.18. This
commit ended up slightly faster than v2.18, but there's a
fair bit of run-to-run noise (the generated code in the two
cases is basically the same). This patch does seem to be
consistently 1-2% faster than v2.19.

I tried changing hashcpy(), which was also touched by
509f6f62a4, in the same way, but couldn't measure any
speedup. Which makes sense, at least for this workload. A
traversal of the whole commit graph requires looking up
every entry of every tree via lookup_object(). That's many
multiples of the numbers of objects in the repository (most
of the lookups just return "yes, we already saw that
object").

Reported-by: Derrick Stolee <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <redacted>
---
 cache.h | 10 ++++++++++
 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)

Reviewed-by: Jonathan Nieder <redacted>

Verified using "make object.s" that the memcmp call goes away.  Thank
you.