Re: [PATCH 2/2] index-pack: prefetch missing REF_DELTA bases

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 16, 2019, 21:42 UTC
Message-ID: <20190516214257.GD10787@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20190516213056.221406-1-jonathantanmy@google.com>

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 02:30:56PM -0700, Jonathan Tan wrote:

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> > So I could go either way, though I do think it makes sense for on-demand
> > fetches for partial clones to avoid asking for thin packs as a general
> > principle.
> 
> This should not be a problem since fetch-pack can already know that
> we're doing an on-demand fetch (args->no_dependents), so we should be
> able to either plumb a "no-thin-pack" arg in the same way or rename
> args->no_dependents to also encompass the no-thin-pack option. But this
> can be done separately from this patch set, I think.

Yeah, I think it can be done separately. Though the two may intermingle if we want to instruct index-pack that it should not try to pre-fetch if we did not ask for a thin pack.

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> > As a matter of fact, should partial clones _always_ avoid
> > asking for thin packs?  That would make this issue go away entirely.
> > 
> > Sometimes it would be more efficient (we do not have to get an extra
> > base object just to resolve the delta we needed) but sometimes worse (if
> > we did actually have the base, it's a win). Whether it's a win would
> > depend on the "hit" rate, and I suspect that is heavily dependent on
> > workload characteristics (what kind of filtering is in use, are we
> > topping up in a non-partial way, etc).
> 
> I think it's best if we still allow servers to serve thin packs. For
> example, if we're excluding only large blobs, clients would still want
> servers to be able to delta against blobs that they have.

Yes, this is getting into the hit-rate thing I mentioned. You're right that for a reasonably typical case of "no blobs over 10MB" we'd have a very high hit rate, and disabling thin packs would almost certainly be a big loss.

I guess even when we have a "miss", the cost is usually not that high either. If we get A as a delta against B, then in the non-thin-pack case we transfer all of A. In the thin-pack case with pre-fetch we transfer all of B, and then the delta. But the delta is often small enough compared to the total content that it's not that big a deal either way. There are pathological cases, of course, but that's already true. :)

So you're right, it's probably still a win to use thin packs when we can.

Show 9 quoted lines

> > Right, REF_DELTA is definitely correctly handled currently, and I don't
> > think that would break with your patch. It's just that your patch would
> > introduce a bunch of extra traffic as we request bases separately that
> > are already in the pack.
> 
> Ah...I see. For this problem, I think that it can be solved with the
> "if (objects[d->obj_no].real_type != OBJ_REF_DELTA)" check that the
> existing code uses before calling read_object(). I'll include this in
> the next reroll if any other issue comes up.

I'm confused about this. Aren't we pre-fetching before we've actually resolved deltas? The base could be in the pack as a true base, and we might have seen it already then. But it could itself be a delta, and we wouldn't know we have it until we resolve it (this gets into the lucky/unlucky ordering thing).

-Peff