Re: [PATCH 0/5] Add a new "sparse" tree walk algorithm

On Wed, Nov 28 2018, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

One of the biggest remaining pain points for users of very large
repositories is the time it takes to run 'git push'. We inspected some slow
pushes by our developers and found that the "Enumerating Objects" phase of a
push was very slow. This is unsurprising, because this is why reachability
bitmaps exist. However, reachability bitmaps are not available to us because
of the single pack-file requirement. The bitmap approach is intended for
servers anyway, and clients have a much different behavior pattern.

Specifically, clients are normally pushing a very small number of objects
compared to the entire working directory. A typical user changes only a
small cone of the working directory, so let's use that to our benefit.

Create a new "sparse" mode for 'git pack-objects' that uses the paths that
introduce new objects to direct our search into the reachable trees. By
collecting trees at each path, we can then recurse into a path only when
there are uninteresting and interesting trees at that path. This gains a
significant performance boost for small topics while presenting a
possibility of packing extra objects.

The main algorithm change is in patch 4, but is set up a little bit in
patches 1 and 2.

As demonstrated in the included test script, we see that the existing
algorithm can send extra objects due to the way we specify the "frontier".
But we can send even more objects if a user copies objects from one folder
to another. I say "copy" because a rename would (usually) change the
original folder and trigger a walk into that path, discovering the objects.

In order to benefit from this approach, the user can opt-in using the
pack.useSparse config setting. This setting can be overridden using the
'--no-sparse' option.

This is really interesting. I tested this with:

    diff --git a/builtin/pack-objects.c b/builtin/pack-objects.c
    index 124b1bafc4..5c7615f06c 100644
    --- a/builtin/pack-objects.c
    +++ b/builtin/pack-objects.c
    @@ -3143 +3143 @@ static void get_object_list(int ac, const char **av)
    -       mark_edges_uninteresting(&revs, show_edge, sparse);
    +       mark_edges_uninteresting(&revs, show_edge, 1);

To emulate having a GIT_TEST_* mode for this, which seems like a good
idea since it turned up a lot of segfaults in pack-objects. I wasn't
able to get a backtrace for that since it always happens indirectly, and
I didn't dig enough to see how to manually invoke it the right way.