[PATCH 0/3] fetch/receive: use batched reference updates

The git-fetch(1) and git-receive-pack(1) commands update references as part of the flow. Each reference update is treated as a single entity and a transaction is created for each update.

This can be really slow, specifically in reference backends where there are optimizations which ensure a single transaction with 'N' reference update perform much faster than 'N' individual transactions. Also having 'N' individual transactions has buildup and teardown costs. These costs add up in repositories with a large number of references.

Also specifically in the reftable backend, 'N' individual transactions would also trigger auto-compaction for every transaction.

The reasoning for using individual transactions is because we want to allow partial updates of references in these commands. Using a single transaction would be an all-or-nothing scenario.

Recently we introduced an in-between solution called batched reference updates in 23fc8e4f61 (refs: implement batch reference update support, 2025-04-08). This allows us to batch a set of reference updates, where individual updates can pass/fail without affecting the batch.

This patch series, modifies both 'git-fetch(1)' and 'git-receive-pack(1)' to use this mechanism. With this, we see a significant performance boost:

+---------------------+---------------+------------------+
|                     | files backend | reftable backend |
+---------------------+---------------+------------------+
| git-fetch(1)        | 1.25x         | 22x              |
| git-receive-pack(1) | 1.21x         | 18x              |
+---------------------+---------------+------------------+

The first and third patch handle the changes for 'git-fetch(1)' and 'git-receive-pack(1)' respectively. The second patch fixes a small memory leak I encountered while working on this series.

This is based on top of master: 7a1d2bd0a5 (Merge branch 'master' of https://github.com/j6t/gitk, 2025-05-09). There were no conflicts observed with next or seen.

---
 builtin/fetch.c                  | 119 +++++++++++++++++++++------------------
 builtin/receive-pack.c           |  88 +++++++++++++++++++++++------
 send-pack.c                      |   7 +++
 t/t1416-ref-transaction-hooks.sh |   2 -
 t/t5408-send-pack-stdin.sh       |  14 ++++-
 5 files changed, 155 insertions(+), 75 deletions(-)

Karthik Nayak (3):
      fetch: use batched reference updates
      send-pack: fix memory leak around duplicate refs
      receive-pack: use batched reference updates

base-commit: 7a1d2bd0a596f42a8a7a68d55577967bb454fec0 change-id: 20250423-501-update-git-fetch-1-to-use-partial-transactions-7fb66339fe79

Thanks
- Karthik