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jgit performance update

From
Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date
Dec 3, 2006, 04:59 UTC
Message-ID
<20061203045953.GE26668@spearce.org>

With the help of Robin Rosenberg I've been able to make jgit's log operation run (on average) within a few milliseconds of core Git.

Walking the 50,000 most recent commits from the Mozilla trunk[1]:
  $ time git rev-list --max-count=50000 HEAD >/dev/null
  core Git:  1.882s (average)
  jgit:      1.932s (average)
  (times are with hot cache and from repeated executions)

I think that is actually pretty good given that jgit is written in Java using a fairly object-oriented design and has to deal with some of the limitations of the language.

One of the biggest annoyances has been the fact that although Java 1.4 offers a way to mmap a file into the process, the overhead to access that data seems to be far higher than just reading the file content into a very large byte array, especially if we are going to access that file content multiple times. So jgit performs worse than core Git early on while it copies everything from the OS buffer cache into the Java process, but then performs reasonably well once the internal cache is hot. On the other hand using the mmap call reduces early latency but hurts the access times so much that we're talking closer to 3s average read times for the same log operation.

Anyway, jgit is now hopefully fast enough that we can start to build some real functionality on top of it, and not need to wait several minutes for answers from those features while debugging them. :)

**1** This is the pack file from Jon Smirl's import attempt.
Next: Robin Rosenberg
Message 1 of 16 in “jgit performance update”
  1. Shawn PearceDec 3, 2006
  2. Robin RosenbergDec 3, 2006
  3. Jakub NarebskiDec 3, 2006
  4. Robin RosenbergDec 3, 2006
  5. Shawn PearceDec 3, 2006
  6. Shawn PearceDec 3, 2006
  7. Linus TorvaldsDec 3, 2006
  8. Jakub NarebskiDec 3, 2006
  9. Juergen StuberDec 3, 2006
  10. Robin RosenbergDec 3, 2006
  11. Jakub NarebskiDec 3, 2006
  12. Shawn PearceDec 4, 2006
  13. Juergen StuberDec 4, 2006
  14. Shawn PearceDec 3, 2006
  15. sfDec 3, 2006
  16. Shawn PearceDec 3, 2006

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