Re: serious performance issues with images, audio files, and other "non-code" data
On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 08:54:02AM -0400, John wrote:
> Thanks so much. It's version 1.5.6.5. I compiled it 3 months ago. For
By git standards, that version is ancient. You may want to try with a more recent version of git (at the very least, multithreaded delta compression has been enabled by default since then).
> I packed the bare repo, then ran `gc --aggressive`.
Note that "gc --aggressive" will repack from scratch, throwing away the previous pack.
> Then I did a `git pull`, which took 35 minutes.
That sounds like a long time. What was taking so long? Was delta compression pegging the CPU? Was it limited during the "Writing objects" phase, which is going to be limited by either disk I/O or network speed?
How big is your packed repo? Given the pattern you describe below, I am beginning to wonder if it is simply the case that even though a single checkout of your repo isn't that large, the complete history of your project may simply be gigantic (e.g., because you are repeatedly writing new apparently-random versions of each file, so your repository size will grow quite quickly).
Remember that a git clone transfers the full history (and a pull will transfer all of the intermediate history). If you have rewritten those files many times, you may be transferring many times your working directory size in history.
> You can simulate it all by generating a batch of 1-100 MB files from
> /dev/urandom (since they won't compress), commit them, then do it
> again many times to simulate edits. Every few iterates, push it
> somewhere.
I tried this script to make a 100M working directory with a 400M .git directory:
-- >8 -- #!/bin/sh
rm -rf big-repo mkdir big-repo && cd big-repo && git init
mark() {
echo "`date` $*"
}randomize() {
mark randomize start
for i in `seq 1 100`; do
openssl rand $((1024*1024)) >$i.rand
done
mark randomize end
}commit() {
mark add start
git add .
mark add end
mark commit start
git commit -m "$1"
mark commit end
}randomize; commit base randomize; commit one randomize; commit two randomize; commit three -- 8< --
Here are a few timings I noted:
- it takes about 5 seconds to generate and write the random data
- git add runs in about 13 seconds. It pegs the CPU hashing all of the
data. - the first commit is nearly instantaneous, as the summary diff takes
no work; subsequent commits spend about 9 seconds to create the
summary diff. Changing commit to "commit -q" drops that to back to
near-instantaneous. - with no attributes set, "time git gc --aggressive" reports:
real 1m31.983s
user 2m29.621s
sys 0m3.732s Note the real/user discrepancy. It's a dual-core machine, and recent
git will multi-thread the delta phase, which is what dominates the
time. This should correspond roughly to the delta-compression phase
of your pull time, as that was just making a pack on the fly (but
now that we are packed, pulls will be limited only by the time to
transfer the objects themselves). - Turning off delta compression for the .rand files makes repacking
much faster: $ echo '*.rand -delta' >.gitattributes
$ time git gc --aggressive
...
real 0m25.354s
user 0m22.057s
sys 0m1.316s The delta compression phase is very quick, and we spend most of our
time writing out the packfile to disk.So I stand by my earlier statements:
1. Use "git commit -q" to avoid wasting time on the commit diff
summary (we should perhaps have a commit.quiet config option for
repos like this where you would almost always want to suppress it). 2. Make sure your upstream repo is packed so pullers do not have to
generate a new packfile all the time. 3. Use -delta where appropriate to avoid useless delta compression.
If things are still slow after that, you'll need to be more specific about your exact workload and exactly what is slow (I am still not sure if delta compression or network bandwidth is the limiting factor for your slow pulls).
-Peff
