This optimizes the "recency order" (see pack-heuristics.txt in
Documentation/technical/ directory) used to order objects within a
packfile in three ways:
- Commits at the tip of tags are written together, in the hope that
revision traversal done in incremental fetch (which starts by
putting them in a revision queue marked as UNINTERESTING) will see a
better locality of these objects;
- In the original recency order, trees and blobs are intermixed. Write
trees together before blobs, in the hope that this will improve
locality when running pathspec-limited revision traversal, i.e.
"git log paths...";
- When writing blob objects out, write the whole family of blobs that use
the same delta base object together, by starting from the root of the
delta chain, and writing its immediate children in a width-first
manner, in the hope that this will again improve locality when reading
blobs that belong to the same path, which are likely to be deltified
against each other.
I tried various workloads in the Linux kernel repositories (HEAD at
v3.0-rc6-71-g4dd1b49) packed with v1.7.6 and with this patch, counting how
large seeks are needed between adjacent accesses to objects in the pack,
and the result looks promising. The history has 2072052 objects, weighing
some 490MiB.
* Simple commit-only log.
$ git log >/dev/null
There are 254656 commits in total.
v1.7.6 with patch
Total number of access : 258,031 258,032
0.0% percentile : 12 12
10.0% percentile : 259 259
20.0% percentile : 294 294
30.0% percentile : 326 326
40.0% percentile : 363 363
50.0% percentile : 415 415
60.0% percentile : 513 513
70.0% percentile : 857 858
80.0% percentile : 10,434 10,441
90.0% percentile : 91,985 91,996
95.0% percentile : 260,852 260,885
99.0% percentile : 1,150,680 1,152,811
99.9% percentile : 3,148,435 3,148,435
Less than 2MiB seek: 99.70% 99.69%
95% of the pack accesses look at data that is no further than 260kB
from the previous location we accessed. The patch does not change the
order of commit objects very much, and the result is very similar.
* Pathspec-limited log.
$ git log drivers/net >/dev/null
The path is touched by 26551 commits and merges (among 254656 total).
v1.7.6 with patch
Total number of access : 559,511 558,663
0.0% percentile : 0 0
10.0% percentile : 182 167
20.0% percentile : 259 233
30.0% percentile : 357 304
40.0% percentile : 714 485
50.0% percentile : 5,046 3,976
60.0% percentile : 688,671 443,578
70.0% percentile : 319,574,732 110,370,100
80.0% percentile : 361,647,599 123,707,229
90.0% percentile : 393,195,669 128,947,636
95.0% percentile : 405,496,875 131,609,321
99.0% percentile : 412,942,470 133,078,115
99.5% percentile : 413,172,266 133,163,349
99.9% percentile : 413,354,356 133,240,445
Less than 2MiB seek: 61.71% 62.87%
With the current pack heuristics, more than 30% of accesses have to
seek further than 300MB; the updated pack heuristics ensures that less
than 0.1% of accesses have to seek further than 135MB. This is largely
due to the fact that the updated heuristics does not mix blobs and
trees together.
* Blame.
$ git blame drivers/net/ne.c >/dev/null
The path is touched by 34 commits and merges.
v1.7.6 with patch
Total number of access : 178,147 178,166
0.0% percentile : 0 0
10.0% percentile : 142 139
20.0% percentile : 222 194
30.0% percentile : 373 300
40.0% percentile : 1,168 837
50.0% percentile : 11,248 7,334
60.0% percentile : 305,121,284 106,850,130
70.0% percentile : 361,427,854 123,709,715
80.0% percentile : 388,127,343 128,171,047
90.0% percentile : 399,987,762 130,200,707
95.0% percentile : 408,230,673 132,174,308
99.0% percentile : 412,947,017 133,181,160
99.5% percentile : 413,312,798 133,220,425
99.9% percentile : 413,352,366 133,269,051
Less than 2MiB seek: 56.47% 56.83%
The result is very similar to the pathspec-limited log above, which
only looks at the tree objects.
* Packing recent history.
$ (git for-each-ref --format='^%(refname)' refs/tags; echo HEAD) |
git pack-objects --revs --stdout >/dev/null
This should pack data worth 71 commits.
v1.7.6 with patch
Total number of access : 11,511 11,514
0.0% percentile : 0 0
10.0% percentile : 48 47
20.0% percentile : 134 98
30.0% percentile : 332 178
40.0% percentile : 1,386 293
50.0% percentile : 8,030 478
60.0% percentile : 33,676 1,195
70.0% percentile : 147,268 26,216
80.0% percentile : 9,178,662 464,598
90.0% percentile : 67,922,665 965,782
95.0% percentile : 87,773,251 1,226,102
99.0% percentile : 98,011,763 1,932,377
99.5% percentile : 100,074,427 33,642,128
99.9% percentile : 105,336,398 275,772,650
Less than 2MiB seek: 77.09% 99.04%
The long-tail part of the result looks worse with the patch, but
the change helps majority of the access. 99.04% of the accesses
need less than 2MiB of seeking, compared to 77.09% with the current
packing heuristics.
* Index pack.
$ git index-pack -v .git/objects/pack/pack*.pack
v1.7.6 with patch
Total number of access : 2,791,228 2,788,802
0.0% percentile : 9 9
10.0% percentile : 140 89
20.0% percentile : 233 167
30.0% percentile : 322 235
40.0% percentile : 464 310
50.0% percentile : 862 423
60.0% percentile : 2,566 686
70.0% percentile : 25,827 1,498
80.0% percentile : 1,317,862 4,971
90.0% percentile : 11,926,385 119,398
95.0% percentile : 41,304,149 952,519
99.0% percentile : 227,613,070 6,709,650
99.5% percentile : 321,265,121 11,734,871
99.9% percentile : 382,919,785 33,155,191
Less than 2MiB seek: 81.73% 96.92%
As the index-pack command already walks objects in the delta chain
order, writing the blobs out in the delta chain order seems to
drastically improve the locality of access.
Note that a half-a-gigabyte packfile comfortably fits in the buffer cache,
and you would unlikely to see much performance difference on a modern and
reasonably beefy machine with enough memory and local disks. Benchmarking
with cold cache (or over NFS) would be interesting.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
1b4bb16b9e