git-commit-vandalism/Documentation/technical
Taylor Blau 59f0d5073f bloom: encode out-of-bounds filters as non-empty
When a changed-path Bloom filter has either zero, or more than a
certain number (commonly 512) of entries, the commit-graph machinery
encodes it as "missing". More specifically, it sets the indices adjacent
in the BIDX chunk as equal to each other to indicate a "length 0"
filter; that is, that the filter occupies zero bytes on disk.

This has heretofore been fine, since the commit-graph machinery has no
need to care about these filters with too few or too many changed paths.
Both cases act like no filter has been generated at all, and so there is
no need to store them.

In a subsequent commit, however, the commit-graph machinery will learn
to only compute Bloom filters for some commits in the current
commit-graph layer. This is a change from the current implementation
which computes Bloom filters for all commits that are in the layer being
written. Critically for this patch, only computing some of the Bloom
filters means adding a third state for length 0 Bloom filters: zero
entries, too many entries, or "hasn't been computed".

It will be important for that future patch to distinguish between "not
representable" (i.e., zero or too-many changed paths), and "hasn't been
computed". In particular, we don't want to waste time recomputing
filters that have already been computed.

To that end, change how we store Bloom filters in the "computed but not
representable" category:

  - Bloom filters with no entries are stored as a single byte with all
    bits low (i.e., all queries to that Bloom filter will return
    "definitely not")

  - Bloom filters with too many entries are stored as a single byte with
    all bits set high (i.e., all queries to that Bloom filter will
    return "maybe").

These rules are sufficient to not incur a behavior change by changing
the on-disk representation of these two classes. Likewise, no
specification changes are necessary for the commit-graph format, either:

  - Filters that were previously empty will be recomputed and stored
    according to the new rules, and

  - old clients reading filters generated by new clients will interpret
    the filters correctly and be none the wiser to how they were
    generated.

Clients will invoke the Bloom machinery in more cases than before, but
this can be addressed by returning a NULL filter when all bits are set
high. This can be addressed in a future patch.

Note that this does increase the size of on-disk commit-graphs, but far
less than other proposals. In particular, this is generally more
efficient than storing a bitmap for which commits haven't computed their
Bloom filters. Storing a bitmap incurs a penalty of one bit per commit,
whereas storing explicit filters as above incurs a penalty of one byte
per too-large or empty commit.

In practice, these boundary commits likely occupy a small proportion of
the overall number of commits, and so the size penalty is likely smaller
than storing a bitmap for all commits.

See, for example, these relative proportions of such boundary commits
(collected by SZEDER Gábor):

                  |     Percentage of     |    commit-graph   |           |
                  |   commits modifying   |     file size     |           |
                  ├────────┬──────────────┼───────────────────┤    pct.   |
                  | 0 path | >= 512 paths | before  |  after  |   change  |
 ┌────────────────┼────────┼──────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────────┤
 | android-base   | 13.20% |        0.13% | 37.468M | 37.534M | +0.1741 % |
 | cmssw          |  0.15% |        0.23% | 17.118M | 17.119M | +0.0091 % |
 | cpython        |  3.07% |        0.01% |  7.967M |  7.971M | +0.0423 % |
 | elasticsearch  |  0.70% |        1.00% |  8.833M |  8.835M | +0.0128 % |
 | gcc            |  0.00% |        0.08% | 16.073M | 16.074M | +0.0030 % |
 | gecko-dev      |  0.14% |        0.64% | 59.868M | 59.874M | +0.0105 % |
 | git            |  0.11% |        0.02% |  3.895M |  3.895M | +0.0020 % |
 | glibc          |  0.02% |        0.10% |  3.555M |  3.555M | +0.0021 % |
 | go             |  0.00% |        0.07% |  3.186M |  3.186M | +0.0018 % |
 | homebrew-cask  |  0.40% |        0.02% |  7.035M |  7.035M | +0.0065 % |
 | homebrew-core  |  0.01% |        0.01% | 11.611M | 11.611M | +0.0002 % |
 | jdk            |  0.26% |        5.64% |  5.537M |  5.540M | +0.0590 % |
 | linux          |  0.01% |        0.51% | 63.735M | 63.740M | +0.0073 % |
 | llvm-project   |  0.12% |        0.03% | 25.515M | 25.516M | +0.0050 % |
 | rails          |  0.10% |        0.10% |  6.252M |  6.252M | +0.0027 % |
 | rust           |  0.07% |        0.17% |  9.364M |  9.364M | +0.0033 % |
 | tensorflow     |  0.09% |        1.02% |  7.009M |  7.010M | +0.0158 % |
 | webkit         |  0.05% |        0.31% | 17.405M | 17.406M | +0.0047 % |

(where the above increase is determined by computing a non-split
commit-graph before and after this patch).

Given that these projects are all "large" by commit count, the storage
cost by writing these filters explicitly is negligible. In the most
extreme example, android-base (which has 494,848 commits at the time of
writing) would have its commit-graph increase by a modest 68.4 KB.

Finally, a test to exercise filters which contain too many changed path
entries will be introduced in a subsequent patch.

Suggested-by: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Helped-by: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-17 21:55:50 -07:00
..
.gitignore
api-error-handling.txt
api-index-skel.txt
api-index.sh
api-merge.txt merge: move doc to ll-merge.h 2019-11-18 15:21:28 +09:00
api-parse-options.txt parse-options: make OPT_ARGUMENT() more useful 2019-03-18 11:44:14 +09:00
api-trace2.txt trace2: teach Git to log environment variables 2020-03-23 13:14:53 -07:00
bitmap-format.txt
bundle-format.txt doc: describe Git bundle format 2020-02-07 12:47:02 -08:00
commit-graph-format.txt bloom: encode out-of-bounds filters as non-empty 2020-09-17 21:55:50 -07:00
commit-graph.txt Merge branch 'jk/lore-is-the-archive' 2019-12-06 15:09:23 -08:00
directory-rename-detection.txt Merge branch 'ja/dir-rename-doc-markup-fix' 2019-04-10 02:14:21 +09:00
hash-function-transition.txt Merge branch 'jk/lore-is-the-archive' 2019-12-06 15:09:23 -08:00
http-protocol.txt doc: fix wrong 4-byte length of pkt-line message 2020-05-21 10:52:01 -07:00
index-format.txt Documentation: fix a bunch of typos, both old and new 2019-11-07 13:42:00 +09:00
long-running-process-protocol.txt Docs: split out long-running subprocess handshake 2018-01-25 11:24:32 -08:00
multi-pack-index.txt Merge branch 'jb/doc-multi-pack-idx-fix' 2020-01-08 12:44:12 -08:00
pack-format.txt pack-format: correct multi-pack-index description 2020-02-10 09:01:48 -08:00
pack-heuristics.txt
pack-protocol.txt doc: fix wrong 4-byte length of pkt-line message 2020-05-21 10:52:01 -07:00
packfile-uri.txt Documentation: add Packfile URIs design doc 2020-06-10 18:06:34 -07:00
partial-clone.txt Merge branch 'jk/lore-is-the-archive' 2019-12-06 15:09:23 -08:00
protocol-capabilities.txt Documentation: document v1 protocol object-format capability 2020-05-13 18:14:08 -07:00
protocol-common.txt Merge branch 'ls/packet-line-protocol-doc-fix' 2016-08-31 10:03:51 -07:00
protocol-v2.txt Merge branch 'bc/sha-256-part-2' 2020-07-06 22:09:13 -07:00
racy-git.txt doc: replace LKML link with lore.kernel.org 2019-12-04 10:26:52 -08:00
reftable.txt reftable: define version 2 of the spec to accomodate SHA256 2020-06-09 13:48:36 -07:00
repository-version.txt doc: move extensions.worktreeConfig to the right place 2018-11-16 14:10:31 +09:00
rerere.txt Documentation: fix a bunch of typos, both old and new 2019-11-07 13:42:00 +09:00
send-pack-pipeline.txt
shallow.txt technical/shallow: describe why shallow cannot use replace refs 2018-04-30 11:12:31 +09:00
signature-format.txt
trivial-merge.txt treewide: correct several "up-to-date" to "up to date" 2017-08-23 12:17:22 -07:00