Re: [RFC PATCH 2/3] grep: honor sparse checkout patterns

From: Matheus Tavares Bernardino <matheus.bernardino@usp.br>
To: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Cc: Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>,
	"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>,
	Stefan Beller <stefanbeller@gmail.com>,
	Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 2/3] grep: honor sparse checkout patterns
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 03:09:30 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHd-oW7xaLcBskLM6bgqgnLukXnwW+bWvGM24Ao_9UxKwdXi3A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABPp-BGUf-4exGW23xka1twf2D=nFOz1CkD_f-rDX_AGdVEeDA@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 12:08 AM Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 7:11 PM Matheus Tavares Bernardino
> <matheus.bernardino@usp.br> wrote:
> >
> > I've been working on the file skipping mechanism using the sparsity
> > patterns directly. But I'm uncertain about some implementation
> > details. So I wanted to share my current plan with you, to get some
> > feedback before going deeper.
> >
> > The first idea was to load the sparsity patterns a priori and pass
> > them to grep_tree(), which recursively greps the entries of a given
> > tree object. If --recurse-submodules is given, however, we would also
> > need to load each surepo's sparse-checkout file on the fly (as the
> > subrepos are lazily initialized in grep_tree()'s call chain). That's
> > not a problem on its own. But in the most naive implementation, this
> > means unnecessarily re-loading the sparse-checkout files of the
> > submodules for each tree given to git-grep (as grep_tree() is called
> > separately for each one of them).
>
> Wouldn't loading the sparse-checkout files be fast compared to
> grepping a submodule for matching strings?  And not just fast, but
> essentially in the noise and hard to even measure?  I have a hard time
> fathoming parsing the sparse-checkout file for a submodule somehow
> appreciably affecting the cost of grepping through that submodule.  If
> the submodule has a huge number of sparse-checkout patterns, that'll
> be because it has a ginormous number of files and grepping through
> them all would be way, way longer.  If the submodule only has a few
> files, then the sparse-checkout file is only going to be a few lines
> at most.

Yeah, makes sense.

> Also, from another angle: I think the original intent of submodules
> was an alternate form of sparse-checkout/partial-clone, letting people
> deal with just their piece of the repo.  As such, do we really even
> expect people to use sparse-checkouts and submodules together, let
> alone use them very heavily together?  Sure, someone will use them,
> but I have a hard time imagining the scale of use of both features
> heavily enough for this to matter, especially since it also requires
> specifying multiple trees to grep (which is slightly unusual) in
> addition to the combination of these other features before your
> optimization here could kick in and be worthwhile.
>
> I'd be very tempted to just implement the most naive implementation
> and maybe leave a TODO note in the code for some future person to come
> along and optimize if it really matters, but I'd like to see numbers
> before we spend the development and maintenance effort on it because
> I'm having a hard time imagining any scale where it could matter.

You're right. I guess I got a little too excited about the
optimizations possibilities and neglected the fact that they might not
even be needed here.

Just to take a look at some numbers, I prototyped the naive
implementation and downloaded a testing repository[1] containing 8
submodules (or 14 counting the nested ones). For each of the
non-nested submodules, I added its .gitignore rules to the
sparse-checkout file (of course this doesn't make any sense for a
real-world usage, but I just wanted to populate the file with a large
quantity of valid rules, to test the parsing time). I also added the
rule '/*'. Then I ran:

git-grep --threads=1 --recurse-submodules -E "config_[a-z]+\(" $(cat /tmp/trees)

Where /tmp/trees contained about 120 trees in the said repository
(again, a probably unreal case, for testing purposes only). Then,
measuring the time spent only inside the function I created to load a
sparse-checkout file for a given 'struct repository', I got to the
following numbers:

Number of calls: 1531 (makes sense: ~120 trees and 14 submodules)
Percentage over the total time: 0.015%
Number of matches: 300897

And using 8 threads, I got the same numbers except for the percentage,
which was a little higher: 0.05%.

So, indeed, the overhead of re-loading the files is too insignificant.
And my cache idea was a premature and unnecessary optimization.

> > So my next idea was to implement a cache, mapping 'struct repository's
> > to 'struct pattern_list'. Well, not 'struct repository' itself, but
> > repo->gitdir. This way we could load each file once, store the pattern
> > list, and quickly retrieve the one that affect the repository
> > currently being grepped, whether it is a submodule or not. But, is
> > gitidir unique per repository? If not, could we use
> > repo_git_path(repo, "info/sparse-checkout") as the key?
> >
> > I already have a prototype implementation of the last idea (using
> > repo_git_path()). But I wanted to make sure, does this seem like a
> > good path? Or should we avoid the work of having this hashmap here and
> > do something else, as adding a 'struct pattern_list' to 'struct
> > repository', directly?
>
> Honestly, it sounds a bit like premature optimization to me.  Sorry if
> that's disappointing since you've apparently already put some effort
> into this, and it sounds like you're on a good track for optimizing
> this if it were necessary, but I'm just having a hard time figuring
> out whether it'd really help and be worth the code complexity.

No problem! I'm glad to have this feedback now, while I'm still
working on v2  :) Now I can focus on what's really relevant. So thanks
again!

[1]: https://github.com/surevine/Metre