[PATCH 1/6] maintenance: add get_random_minute()

From: Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget <gitgitgadget@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 7, 2023, 18:51 UTC
Message-ID: <fefdaa9457948ee5302e7cbfaae250e0b589d752.1691434300.git.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <pull.1567.git.1691434300.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

From: Derrick Stolee <derrickstolee@github.com>

When we initially created background maintenance -- with its hourly, daily, and weekly schedules -- we considered the effects of all clients launching fetches to the server every hour on the hour. The worry of DDoSing server hosts was noted, but left as something we would consider for a future update.

As background maintenance has gained more adoption over the past three years, our worries about DDoSing the big Git hosts has been unfounded. Those systems, especially those serving public repositories, are already resilient to thundering herds of much smaller scale.

However, sometimes organizations spin up specific custom server infrastructure either in addition to or on top of their Git host. Some of these technologies are built for a different range of scale, and can hit concurrency limits sooner. Organizations with such custom infrastructures are more likely to recommend tools like `scalar` which furthers their adoption of background maintenance.

To help solve for this, create get_random_minute() as a method to help Git select a random minute when creating schedules in the future. The integrations with this method do not yet exist, but will follow in future changes.

One thing that is important for testability is that we notice when we are under a test scenario and return a predictable result. The schedules themselves are not checked for this value, but at least one launchctl test checks that we do not unnecessarily reboot the schedule if it has not changed from a previous version.

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <derrickstolee@github.com>
---
 builtin/gc.c | 17 +++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+)

diff --git a/builtin/gc.c b/builtin/gc.c
index f3942188a61..66a972bc292 100644
--- a/builtin/gc.c
+++ b/builtin/gc.c
@@ -1708,6 +1708,23 @@ static int get_schedule_cmd(const char **cmd, int *is_available)
 	return 1;
 }
 
+MAYBE_UNUSED
+static int get_random_minute(void)
+{
+	static int random_initialized = 0;
+
+	/* Use a static value when under tests. */
+	if (!getenv("GIT_TEST_MAINTENANCE_SCHEDULER"))
+		return 13;
+
+	if (!random_initialized) {
+		srand((unsigned int)getpid());
+		random_initialized = 1;
+	}
+
+	return rand() % 60;
+}
+
 static int is_launchctl_available(void)
 {
 	const char *cmd = "launchctl";

-- 
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