[PATCH 8/9] sha1-file: use loose object cache for quick existence check

In cases where we expect to ask has_sha1_file() about a lot of objects that we are not likely to have (e.g., during fetch negotiation), we already use OBJECT_INFO_QUICK to sacrifice accuracy (due to racing with a simultaneous write or repack) for speed (we avoid re-scanning the pack directory).

However, even checking for loose objects can be expensive, as we will stat() each one. On many systems this cost isn't too noticeable, but stat() can be particularly slow on some operating systems, or due to network filesystems.

Since the QUICK flag already tells us that we're OK with a slightly stale answer, we can use that as a cue to look in our in-memory cache of each object directory. That basically trades an in-memory binary search for a stat() call.

Note that it is possible for this to actually be _slower_. We'll do a full readdir() to fill the cache, so if you have a very large number of loose objects and a very small number of lookups, that readdir() may end up more expensive.

This shouldn't be a big deal in practice. If you have a large number of reachable loose objects, you'll already run into performance problems (which you should remedy by repacking). You may have unreachable objects which wouldn't otherwise impact performance. Usually these would go away with the prune step of "git gc", but they may be held for up to 2 weeks in the default configuration.

So it comes down to how many such objects you might reasonably expect to have, how much slower is readdir() on N entries versus M stat() calls (and here we really care about the syscall backing readdir(), like getdents() on Linux, but I'll just call this readdir() below).

If N is much smaller than M (a typical packed repo), we know this is a big win (few readdirs() followed by many uses of the resulting cache). When N and M are similar in size, it's also a win. We care about the latency of making a syscall, and readdir() should be giving us many values in a single call. How many?

On Linux, running "strace -e getdents ls" shows a 32k buffer getting 512 entries per call (which is 64 bytes per entry; the name itself is 38 bytes, plus there are some other fields). So we can imagine that this is always a win as long as the number of loose objects in the repository is a factor of 500 less than the number of lookups you make. It's hard to auto-tune this because we don't generally know up front how many lookups we're going to do. But it's unlikely for this to perform significantly worse.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
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There's some obvious hand-waving in the paragraphs above. I would love
it if somebody with an NFS system could do some before/after timings
with various numbers of loose objects, to get a sense of where the
breakeven point is.

My gut is that we do not need the complexity of a cache-size limit, nor of a config option to disable this. But it would be nice to have a real number where "reasonable" ends and "pathological" begins. :)

 object-store.h |  1 +
 sha1-file.c    | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 21 insertions(+)