Re: Git is not scalable with too many refs/*

[Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:52:04 -0600, Martin Fick wrote:
> On Monday, September 26, 2011 03:39:33 pm Martin Fick wrote:
>> On Monday, September 26, 2011 02:28:53 pm Julian Phillips
>> wrote:
>> > >> Random thought.  What happens to the with
>> > >> compression case if you leave the commit in, but
>> > >> add a sleep(15) to the end of sort_refs_list?
>> > >
>> > > Why, what are you thinking?  Hmm, I am trying this on
>> > > the non gced repo and it doesn't seem to be
>> > > completing (no cpu usage)!  It appears that perhaps
>> > > it is being called many times (the sleeping would
>> > > explain no cpu usage)?!?  This could be a real
>> > > problem, this should only get called once right?
>> >
>> > I was just wondering if the time taken to get the refs
>> > was changing the interaction with something else.  Not
>> > very likely, but ...
>> >
>> > I added a print statement, and it was called four times
>> > when I had unpacked refs, and once with packed.  So,
>> > maybe you are hitting some nasty case with unpacked
>> > refs.  If you use a print statement instead of a sleep,
>> > how many times does sort_refs_lists get called in your
>> > unpacked case?  It may well also be worth calculating
>> > the time taken to do the sort.
>>
>> In my case it was called 18785 times!  Any other tests I
>> should run?
>
> Gerrit stores the changes in directories under refs/changes
> named after the last 2 digits of the change.  Then under
> each change it stores each patchset.  So it looks like this:
> refs/changes/dd/change_num/ps_num
>
> I noticed that:
>
>  ls refs/changes/* | wc -l
>  -> 18876
>
> somewhat close, but not super close to 18785,  I am not sure
> if that is a clue.  It's almost like each change is causing
> a re-sort,

basically, it is ...

Back when I made that change, I failed to notice that get_ref_dir was 
recursive for subdirectories ... sorry ...

Hopefully this should speed things up.  My test repo went from ~17m 
user time, to ~2.5s.
Packing still make things much faster of course.

diff --git a/refs.c b/refs.c
index a615043..212e7ec 100644
--- a/refs.c
+++ b/refs.c
@@ -319,7 +319,7 @@ static struct ref_list *get_ref_dir(const char 
*submodule, c
                 free(ref);
                 closedir(dir);
         }
-       return sort_ref_list(list);
+       return list;
  }

  struct warn_if_dangling_data {
@@ -361,11 +361,13 @@ static struct ref_list *get_loose_refs(const char 
*submodu
         if (submodule) {
                 free_ref_list(submodule_refs.loose);
                 submodule_refs.loose = get_ref_dir(submodule, "refs", 
NULL);
+               submodule_refs.loose = 
sort_refs_list(submodule_refs.loose);
                 return submodule_refs.loose;
         }

         if (!cached_refs.did_loose) {
                 cached_refs.loose = get_ref_dir(NULL, "refs", NULL);
+               cached_refs.loose = sort_refs_list(cached_refs.loose);
                 cached_refs.did_loose = 1;
         }
         return cached_refs.loose;



>
>
> -Martin

-- 
Julian