[PATCH 0/6] maintenance: schedule maintenance on a random minute

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.

This series attempts to help by spreading out background maintenance to a random minute of the hour. This minute is selected during git maintenance start, and the same minute applies to each of the three schedules.

This isn't a full solution to this problem, as the custom infrastructure needs to be resilient to bursts of activity, but at least this will help somewhat.

Each of the integrated schedulers needs a different way of integrating the random minute. The most problematic is systemd, since our integration had a clever use of templates to write one schedule that inserted the hourly, daily, and weekly schedules as a string into the template. This needs some refactoring before the custom minute could be inserted.

For the most part, each scheduler's integration is relatively simple. That is, until we get to the systemd integration. That integration made use of a clever templating technique that is no longer possible when making this adjustment. The last two patches involve systemd, though one is just a move of code (without edits) to make the second's diff look a lot simpler.

Thanks, -Stolee

Derrick Stolee (6):
  maintenance: add get_random_minute()
  maintenance: use random minute in launchctl scheduler
  maintenance: use random minute in Windows scheduler
  maintenance: use random minute in cron scheduler
  maintenance: swap method locations
  maintenance: use random minute in systemd scheduler

 builtin/gc.c           | 259 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
 t/t7900-maintenance.sh |   4 +-
 2 files changed, 166 insertions(+), 97 deletions(-)

base-commit: fe86abd7511a9a6862d5706c6fa1d9b57a63ba09
Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-1567%2Fderrickstolee%2Fmaintenance-random-minute-v1
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-1567/derrickstolee/maintenance-random-minute-v1
Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/1567