Re: [GSoC Patch 0/3] Move generation, graph_pos to a slab

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 7, 2020, 19:53 UTC
Message-ID: <20200607195347.GA8232@szeder.dev>
In-Reply-To: <b850637d-a7ca-e8f9-5009-657096ea2975@gmail.com>

On Thu, Jun 04, 2020 at 10:22:27AM -0400, Derrick Stolee wrote:

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> On 6/4/2020 3:27 AM, Abhishek Kumar wrote:
> > The struct commit is used in many contexts. However, members generation
> > and graph_pos are only used for commit-graph related operations and
> > otherwise waste memory.
> > 
> > This wastage would have been more pronounced as transistion to
> > generation number v2, which uses 64-bit generation number instead of
> > current 32-bits.
> 
> Thanks! This is an important step, and will already improve
> performance in subtle ways.

While the reduced memory footprint of each commit object might improve performance, accessing graph position and generation numbers in a commit-slab is more expensive than direct field accesses in 'struct commit' instances. Consequently, these patches increase the runtime of 'git merge-base --is-ancestor HEAD~50000 HEAD' in the linux repository from 0.630s to 0.940s.

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> >  create mode 100644 contrib/coccinelle/generation.cocci
> >  create mode 100644 contrib/coccinelle/graph_pos.cocci
> 
> I appreciate the Coccinelle scripts to help identify
> automatic fixes for other topics in-flight. However,
> I wonder if they would be better placed inside the
> existing commit.cocci file?

We add Coccinelle scripts to avoid undesirable code patterns entering our code base. That, however, is not the case here: this is a one-time conversion, and at the end of this series 'struct commit' won't have a 'generation' field anymore, so once it's merged the compiler will catch any new 'commit->generation' accesses. Therefore I don't think that these Coccinelle scripts should be added at all.