[PATCH v2 2/2] list-objects: only look at cmdline trees with edge_hint

When rev-list is given a command-line like:

  git rev-list --objects $commit --not --all

the most accurate answer is the difference between the set of objects reachable from $commit and the set reachable from all of the existing refs. However, we have not historically provided that answer, because it is very expensive to calculate. We would have to open every tree of every commit in the entire history.

Instead, we find the accurate set difference of the reachable commits, and then mark the trees at the boundaries as uninteresting. This misses objects which appear in the trees of both the interesting commits and deep within the uninteresting history.

Commit fbd4a70 (list-objects: mark more commits as edges in mark_edges_uninteresting, 2013-08-16) noticed that we miss those objects during pack-objects, and added code to examine the trees of all of the "--not" refs given on the command-line. Note that this is still not the complete set difference, because we look only at the tips of the command-line arguments, not all of their reachable commits. But it increases the set of boundary objects we consider, which is especially important for shallow fetches. So we are trading extra CPU time for a larger set of boundary objects, which can improve the resulting pack size for a --thin pack.

This tradeoff probably makes sense in the context of pack-objects, where we have set revs->edge_hint to have the traversal feed us the set of boundary objects. For a regular rev-list, though, it is probably not a good tradeoff. It is true that it makes our list slightly closer to a true set difference, but it is a rare case where this is important. And because we do not have revs->edge_hint set, we do nothing useful with the larger set of boundary objects.

This patch therefore ties the extra tree examination to the revs->edge_hint flag; it is the presence of that flag that makes the tradeoff worthwhile.

Here is output from the p0001-rev-list showing the improvement in performance:

Test HEAD^ HEAD ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0001.1: rev-list --all 0.69(0.65+0.02) 0.69(0.66+0.02) +0.0% 0001.2: rev-list --all --objects 3.22(3.19+0.03) 3.23(3.20+0.03) +0.3% 0001.4: rev-list $commit --not --all 0.04(0.04+0.00) 0.04(0.04+0.00) +0.0% 0001.5: rev-list --objects $commit --not --all 0.27(0.26+0.01) 0.04(0.04+0.00) -85.2%

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
 list-objects.c | 20 +++++++++++---------
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)