Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

On Fri, Oct 06, 2023 at 06:09:25PM +0000, Victoria Dye via GitGitGadget wrote:

quoted

While investigating ref iteration performance in builtins like
'for-each-ref' and 'show-ref', I found two small improvement opportunities.

The first patch tweaks the logic around prefix matching in
'cache_ref_iterator_advance' so that we correctly skip refs that do not
actually match a given prefix. The unnecessary iteration doesn't seem to be
causing any bugs in the ref iteration commands that I've tested, but it
doesn't hurt to be more precise (and it helps with some other patches I'm
working on ;) ).

The next three patches update how 'loose_fill_ref_dir' determines the type
of ref cache entry to create (directory or regular). On platforms that
include d_type information in 'struct dirent' (as far as I can tell, all
except NonStop & certain versions of Cygwin), this allows us to skip calling
'stat'. In ad-hoc testing, this improved performance of 'git for-each-ref'
by about 20%.

I've done a small set of benchmarks with my usual test repositories,
which is linux.git with a bunch of references added. The repository
comes in four sizes:

- small: 50k references
- medium: 500k references
- high:  1.1m references
- huge: 12m references

Unfortunately, I couldn't really reproduce the performance improvements.
In fact, the new version runs consistently a tiny bit slower than the
old version:

    # Old version, which is 3a06386e31 (The fifteenth batch, 2023-10-04).

    Benchmark 1: git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=small)
      Time (mean ± σ):     135.5 ms ±   1.2 ms    [User: 76.4 ms, System: 59.0 ms]
      Range (min … max):   134.8 ms … 136.9 ms    3 runs

    Benchmark 2: git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=medium)
      Time (mean ± σ):     822.7 ms ±   2.2 ms    [User: 697.4 ms, System: 125.1 ms]
      Range (min … max):   821.1 ms … 825.2 ms    3 runs

    Benchmark 3: git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=high)
      Time (mean ± σ):      1.960 s ±  0.015 s    [User: 1.702 s, System: 0.257 s]
      Range (min … max):    1.944 s …  1.973 s    3 runs

    # New version, which is your tip.

    Benchmark 4: git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=huge)
      Time (mean ± σ):     16.815 s ±  0.054 s    [User: 15.091 s, System: 1.722 s]
      Range (min … max):   16.760 s … 16.869 s    3 runs

    Benchmark 5: git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=small)
      Time (mean ± σ):     136.0 ms ±   0.2 ms    [User: 78.8 ms, System: 57.1 ms]
      Range (min … max):   135.8 ms … 136.2 ms    3 runs

    Benchmark 6: git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=medium)
      Time (mean ± σ):     830.4 ms ±  21.2 ms    [User: 691.3 ms, System: 138.7 ms]
      Range (min … max):   814.2 ms … 854.5 ms    3 runs

    Benchmark 7: git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=high)
      Time (mean ± σ):      1.966 s ±  0.013 s    [User: 1.717 s, System: 0.249 s]
      Range (min … max):    1.952 s …  1.978 s    3 runs

    Benchmark 8: git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=huge)
      Time (mean ± σ):     16.945 s ±  0.037 s    [User: 15.182 s, System: 1.760 s]
      Range (min … max):   16.910 s … 16.983 s    3 runs

    Summary
      git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=small) ran
        1.00 ± 0.01 times faster than git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=small)
        6.07 ± 0.06 times faster than git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=medium)
        6.13 ± 0.17 times faster than git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=medium)
       14.46 ± 0.17 times faster than git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=high)
       14.51 ± 0.16 times faster than git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=high)
      124.09 ± 1.15 times faster than git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=huge)
      125.05 ± 1.12 times faster than git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=huge)

The performance regression isn't all that concerning, but it makes me
wonder why I see things becoming slower rather than faster. My guess is
that this is because all my test repositories are well-packed and don't
have a lot of loose references. But I just wanted to confirm how you
benchmarked your change and what the underlying shape of your test repo
was.

I ran my benchmark on my (Intel) Mac with a test repository (single commit,
one file) containing:

- 10k refs/heads/ references
- 10k refs/tags/ references
- 10k refs/special/ references 

All refs in the repository are loose. My Mac has historically been somewhat
slow and inconsistent when it comes to perf testing, though, so I re-ran the
benchmark a bit more formally on an Ubuntu VM (3 warmup iterations followed
by at least 10 iterations per test):

---

Benchmark 1: git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=3k)
  Time (mean ± σ):      40.6 ms ±   3.9 ms    [User: 13.2 ms, System: 27.1 ms]
  Range (min … max):    37.2 ms …  59.1 ms    76 runs
 
  Warning: Statistical outliers were detected. Consider re-running this benchmark on a quiet system without any interferences from other programs. It might help to use the '--warmup' or '--prepare' options.
 
Benchmark 2: git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=3k)
  Time (mean ± σ):      38.7 ms ±   4.4 ms    [User: 13.8 ms, System: 24.5 ms]
  Range (min … max):    35.1 ms …  57.2 ms    71 runs
 
  Warning: Statistical outliers were detected. Consider re-running this benchmark on a quiet system without any interferences from other programs. It might help to use the '--warmup' or '--prepare' options.
 
Benchmark 3: git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=30k)
  Time (mean ± σ):     419.4 ms ±  43.9 ms    [User: 136.4 ms, System: 274.1 ms]
  Range (min … max):   385.1 ms … 528.7 ms    10 runs
 
Benchmark 4: git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=30k)
  Time (mean ± σ):     390.4 ms ±  27.2 ms    [User: 133.1 ms, System: 251.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):   360.3 ms … 447.6 ms    10 runs
 
Benchmark 5: git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=300k)
  Time (mean ± σ):      4.171 s ±  0.052 s    [User: 1.400 s, System: 2.715 s]
  Range (min … max):    4.118 s …  4.283 s    10 runs
 
Benchmark 6: git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=300k)
  Time (mean ± σ):      3.939 s ±  0.054 s    [User: 1.403 s, System: 2.466 s]
  Range (min … max):    3.858 s …  4.026 s    10 runs
 
Summary
  'git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=3k)' ran
    1.05 ± 0.16 times faster than 'git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=3k)'
   10.08 ± 1.34 times faster than 'git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=30k)'
   10.83 ± 1.67 times faster than 'git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=30k)'
  101.68 ± 11.63 times faster than 'git for-each-ref (revision=new,refcount=300k)'
  107.67 ± 12.30 times faster than 'git for-each-ref (revision=old,refcount=300k)'

---

So it's not the 20% speedup I saw on my local test repo (it's more like
5-8%), but there does appear to be a consistent improvement. As for your
results, the changes in this series shouldn't affect packed ref operations,
and the difference between old & new doesn't seem to indicate a regression.