Re: [PATCH/RFC 1/1] gc --auto: exclude the largest giant pack in low-memory config

> Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy  <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> pack-objects could be a big memory hog especially on large repos,
>> everybody knows that. The suggestion to stick a .keep file on the
>> largest pack to avoid this problem is also known for a long time.
>
> Yup, but not that it is not "largest" per-se.  The thing being large
> is a mere consequence that it is the base pack that holds the bulk
> of older parts of the history (e.g. the one that you obtained via
> the initial clone).

>> Let's do the suggestion automatically instead of waiting for people to
>> come to Git mailing list and get the advice. When a certain condition
>> is met, gc --auto create a .keep file temporary before repack is run,
>> then remove it afterward.
>>
>> gc --auto does this based on an estimation of pack-objects memory
>> usage and whether that fits in one third of system memory (the
>> assumption here is for desktop environment where there are many other
>> applications running).
>>
>> Since the estimation may be inaccurate and that 1/3 threshold is
>> arbitrary, give the user a finer control over this mechanism as well:
>> if the largest pack is larger than gc.bigPackThreshold, it's kept.
>
> If this is a transient mechanism during a single gc session, it
> would be far more preferrable if we can find a way to do this
> without actually having a .keep file on the filesystem.