Re: [PATCH 4/4] core.abbrev: raise the default abbreviation to 12 hexdigits

> On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 5:57 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > Actually, all the other cases seem to be "parse a SHA1 with a known
> > length", so they really don't have a negative length.  So this seems
> > ok, and is easier to verify than the "what all contexts might use
> > DEFAULT_ABBREV" thing. There's only a few callers, and it's a static
> > function so it's easy to check it locally in sha1_name.c.
> 
> Here's my original patch with just a tiny change that instead of
> starting the automatic guessing at 7 each time, it starts at
> "default_automatic_abbrev", which is initialized to 7.
> 
> The difference is that if we decide that "oh, that was too small, need
> to repeat", we also update that "default_automatic_abbrev" value, so
> that we won't start at the number that we now know was too small.
> 
> So it still loops over the abbrev values, but now it only loops a
> couple of times.
> 
> I actually verified the performance impact by doing
> 
>       time git rev-list --abbrev-commit HEAD > /dev/null
> 
> on the kernel git tree, and it does actually matter. With my original
> patch, we wasted a noticeable amount of time on just the extra
> looping, with this it's down to the same performance as just doing it
> once at init time (it's about 12s vs 9s on my laptop).