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author | Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> | 2020-09-25 12:33:36 +0000 |
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committer | Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> | 2020-09-25 10:53:04 -0700 |
commit | 52fe41ff1cd6e1f0b67d4e864e718d949e225f30 (patch) | |
tree | eec2fdbd162e5797eb509ce0d39cdfa21a5345a8 /Documentation/git-get-tar-commit-id.txt | |
parent | midx: use start_delayed_progress() (diff) | |
download | tgif-52fe41ff1cd6e1f0b67d4e864e718d949e225f30.tar.xz |
maintenance: add incremental-repack task
The previous change cleaned up loose objects using the
'loose-objects' that can be run safely in the background. Add a
similar job that performs similar cleanups for pack-files.
One issue with running 'git repack' is that it is designed to
repack all pack-files into a single pack-file. While this is the
most space-efficient way to store object data, it is not time or
memory efficient. This becomes extremely important if the repo is
so large that a user struggles to store two copies of the pack on
their disk.
Instead, perform an "incremental" repack by collecting a few small
pack-files into a new pack-file. The multi-pack-index facilitates
this process ever since 'git multi-pack-index expire' was added in
19575c7 (multi-pack-index: implement 'expire' subcommand,
2019-06-10) and 'git multi-pack-index repack' was added in ce1e4a1
(midx: implement midx_repack(), 2019-06-10).
The 'incremental-repack' task runs the following steps:
1. 'git multi-pack-index write' creates a multi-pack-index file if
one did not exist, and otherwise will update the multi-pack-index
with any new pack-files that appeared since the last write. This
is particularly relevant with the background fetch job.
When the multi-pack-index sees two copies of the same object, it
stores the offset data into the newer pack-file. This means that
some old pack-files could become "unreferenced" which I will use
to mean "a pack-file that is in the pack-file list of the
multi-pack-index but none of the objects in the multi-pack-index
reference a location inside that pack-file."
2. 'git multi-pack-index expire' deletes any unreferenced pack-files
and updaes the multi-pack-index to drop those pack-files from the
list. This is safe to do as concurrent Git processes will see the
multi-pack-index and not open those packs when looking for object
contents. (Similar to the 'loose-objects' job, there are some Git
commands that open pack-files regardless of the multi-pack-index,
but they are rarely used. Further, a user that self-selects to
use background operations would likely refrain from using those
commands.)
3. 'git multi-pack-index repack --bacth-size=<size>' collects a set
of pack-files that are listed in the multi-pack-index and creates
a new pack-file containing the objects whose offsets are listed
by the multi-pack-index to be in those objects. The set of pack-
files is selected greedily by sorting the pack-files by modified
time and adding a pack-file to the set if its "expected size" is
smaller than the batch size until the total expected size of the
selected pack-files is at least the batch size. The "expected
size" is calculated by taking the size of the pack-file divided
by the number of objects in the pack-file and multiplied by the
number of objects from the multi-pack-index with offset in that
pack-file. The expected size approximates how much data from that
pack-file will contribute to the resulting pack-file size. The
intention is that the resulting pack-file will be close in size
to the provided batch size.
The next run of the incremental-repack task will delete these
repacked pack-files during the 'expire' step.
In this version, the batch size is set to "0" which ignores the
size restrictions when selecting the pack-files. It instead
selects all pack-files and repacks all packed objects into a
single pack-file. This will be updated in the next change, but
it requires doing some calculations that are better isolated to
a separate change.
These steps are based on a similar background maintenance step in
Scalar (and VFS for Git) [1]. This was incredibly effective for
users of the Windows OS repository. After using the same VFS for Git
repository for over a year, some users had _thousands_ of pack-files
that combined to up to 250 GB of data. We noticed a few users were
running into the open file descriptor limits (due in part to a bug
in the multi-pack-index fixed by af96fe3 (midx: add packs to
packed_git linked list, 2019-04-29).
These pack-files were mostly small since they contained the commits
and trees that were pushed to the origin in a given hour. The GVFS
protocol includes a "prefetch" step that asks for pre-computed pack-
files containing commits and trees by timestamp. These pack-files
were grouped into "daily" pack-files once a day for up to 30 days.
If a user did not request prefetch packs for over 30 days, then they
would get the entire history of commits and trees in a new, large
pack-file. This led to a large number of pack-files that had poor
delta compression.
By running this pack-file maintenance step once per day, these repos
with thousands of packs spanning 200+ GB dropped to dozens of pack-
files spanning 30-50 GB. This was done all without removing objects
from the system and using a constant batch size of two gigabytes.
Once the work was done to reduce the pack-files to small sizes, the
batch size of two gigabytes means that not every run triggers a
repack operation, so the following run will not expire a pack-file.
This has kept these repos in a "clean" state.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/scalar/blob/master/Scalar.Common/Maintenance/PackfileMaintenanceStep.cs
Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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