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authorLibravatar Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>2020-09-25 12:33:36 +0000
committerLibravatar Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2020-09-25 10:53:04 -0700
commit52fe41ff1cd6e1f0b67d4e864e718d949e225f30 (patch)
treeeec2fdbd162e5797eb509ce0d39cdfa21a5345a8 /Documentation/git-worktree.txt
parentmidx: use start_delayed_progress() (diff)
downloadtgif-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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