Re: [PATCH] refs: sync loose refs to disk before committing them

Hi Peff & Patrick,

On Fri, 5 Nov 2021, Jeff King wrote:

On Fri, Nov 05, 2021 at 03:07:18AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

quoted

  2. It's not clear what the performance implications will be,
     especially on a busy server doing a lot of ref updates, or on a
     filesystem where fsync() ends up syncing everything, not just the
     one file (my impression is ext3 is such a system, but not ext4).
     Whereas another solution may be journaling data and metadata writes
     in order without worrying about the durability of writing them to
     disk.

     I suspect for small updates (say, a push of one or two refs), this
     will have little impact. We'd generally fsync the incoming packfile
     and its idx anyway, so we're adding may one or two fsyncs on top of
     that. But if you're pushing 100 refs, that will be 100 sequential
     fsyncs, which may add up to quite a bit of latency. It would be
     nice if we could batch these by somehow (e.g., by opening up all of
     the lockfiles, writing and fsyncing them, and then renaming one by
     one).

So here's a quick experiment that shows a worst case: a small push that
updates a bunch of refs. After building Git with and without your patch,
I set up a small repo like:

  git init
  git commit --allow-empty -m foo
  for i in $(seq 100); do
    git update-ref refs/heads/$i HEAD
  done

To give a clean slate between runs, I stuck this in a script called
"setup":

  #!/bin/sh
  rm -rf dst.git
  git init --bare dst.git
  sync

And then ran:

  $ hyperfine -L v orig,fsync -p ./setup '/tmp/{v}/bin/git push dst.git refs/heads/*'
  Benchmark 1: /tmp/orig/bin/git push dst.git refs/heads/*
    Time (mean ± σ):       9.9 ms ±   0.2 ms    [User: 6.3 ms, System: 4.7 ms]
    Range (min … max):     9.5 ms …  10.5 ms    111 runs

  Benchmark 2: /tmp/fsync/bin/git push dst.git refs/heads/*
    Time (mean ± σ):     401.0 ms ±   7.7 ms    [User: 9.4 ms, System: 15.2 ms]
    Range (min … max):   389.4 ms … 412.4 ms    10 runs

  Summary
    '/tmp/orig/bin/git push dst.git refs/heads/*' ran
     40.68 ± 1.16 times faster than '/tmp/fsync/bin/git push dst.git refs/heads/*'

So it really does produce a noticeable impact (this is on a system with
a decent SSD and no other disk load, so I'd expect it to be about
average for modern hardware).

Now this test isn't entirely fair. 100 refs is a larger than average
number to be pushing, and the effect is out-sized because there's
virtually no time spent dealing with the objects themselves, nor is
there any network latency. But 400ms feels like a non-trivial amount of
time just in absolute numbers.

The numbers scale pretty linearly, as you'd expect. Pushing 10 refs
takes ~40ms, 100 takes ~400ms, and 1000 takes ~4s. The non-fsyncing
version gets slower, too (there's more work to do), but much more slowly
(6ms, 10ms, and 50ms respectively).

So this will definitely hurt at edge / pathological cases.

Ouch.

I wonder whether this could be handled similarly to the
`core.fsyncObjectFiles=batch` mode that has been proposed in
https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.1076.v8.git.git.1633366667.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/ (local)

Essentially, we would have to find a better layer to do this, where we
can synchronize after a potentially quite large number of ref updates has
happened. That would definitely be a different layer than the file-based
refs backend, of course, and would probably apply in a different way to
other refs backends.

Ciao,
Dscho