In 829231dc20 (reftable/merged: reuse buffer to compute record keys,
2023-12-11), we have refactored the merged iterator to reuse a pair of
long-living strbufs by relying on the fact that `reftable_record_key()`
tries to reuse already allocated strbufs by calling `strbuf_reset()`,
which should give us significantly fewer reallocations compared to the
old code that used on-stack strbufs that are allocated for each and
every iteration. Unfortunately, we called `strbuf_release()` on these
long-living strbufs that we meant to reuse on each iteration, defeating
the optimization.

Fix this performance issue by not releasing those buffers on iteration
anymore, where we instead rely on `merged_iter_close()` to release the
buffers for us.

Using `git show-ref --quiet` in a repository with ~350k refs this leads
to a significant drop in allocations. Before:

    HEAP SUMMARY:
        in use at exit: 21,163 bytes in 193 blocks
      total heap usage: 1,410,148 allocs, 1,409,955 frees, 61,976,068 bytes allocated

After:

    HEAP SUMMARY:
        in use at exit: 21,163 bytes in 193 blocks
      total heap usage: 708,058 allocs, 707,865 frees, 36,783,255 bytes allocated

Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <redacted>
---
 reftable/merged.c | 2 --
 1 file changed, 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/reftable/merged.c b/reftable/merged.c
index 556bb5c556..a28bb99aaf 100644
--- a/reftable/merged.c
+++ b/reftable/merged.c

@@ -128,8 +128,6 @@ static int merged_iter_next_entry(struct merged_iter *mi,
 
 done:
 	reftable_record_release(&entry.rec);
-	strbuf_release(&mi->entry_key);
-	strbuf_release(&mi->key);
 	return err;
 }
 

-- 
2.43.GIT