[PATCH 0/1] Make upload-pack pack write size configurable

When transfering packfile data, upload-pack.c uses an 8KB buffer. This is a reasonable size but when you transfer a lot of packfile data, like we do on GitLab.com, we find it is beneficial to use a larger buffer size.

Below you will find a commit where we make the size of this 8KB buffer configurable at compile time. It appears pack-objects always does 8KB writes so I don't think we should change the default. But for GitLab, where we have a cache for the output of pack-objects, it is beneficial to use a larger IO size because the cache does 64KB writes.

I have also considered converting the packfile copying code to use stdio when writing to stdout, but that would be a bigger change because we have to be careful not to interleave stdio and stdlib writes. And we would have to make the stdout output buffer size configurable, because the default stdio buffer size is 4KB which is no better than the status quo. A final argument against the stdio approach is that it only reduces the number of writes from upload-pack, while a larger buffer size reduces both the number of reads and writes.

Having said all that, if the Git maintainers prefer the stdio approach over this compile time constant, I am happy to submit a patch series for that instead.

Thanks,

Jacob Vosmaer

Jacob Vosmaer (1):
  upload-pack.c: make output buffer size configurable

 upload-pack.c | 6 +++++-
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)