Re: [PATCH 07/14] tree-diff: drop path_appendnew() alloc optimization

On Thu, Jan 09, 2025 at 03:46:49AM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

So my conclusion is that it probably does help a little, but it's mostly
lost in the noise. I could see an argument for keeping it, as the
complexity is hidden away in functions that do not often need to be
touched. But it does make them more confusing than necessary (despite
some detailed explanations from the author of that commit; it just took
me a while to wrap my head around what was going on) and prevents
further refactoring of the combine_diff_path struct. So let's drop it.

A 1% performance speedup does not feel like a good argument to me, so
I'm perfectly fine with dropping the code, even if most of it is
actually in the form of comments. But that already shows that it needs
quite a bit of explanation.

I wonder though: did you also use e.g. Valgrind to compare the number of
allocations? glibc tends to be heavily optimized with regards to small
allocations, so you typically don't notice the performance impact caused
by them even when the number of saved allocations is significant. So the
effect might be more pronounced with other libcs that aren't optimized
for such usecases, like e.g. musl libc.

Patrick