sha1-lookup: more memory efficient search in sorted list of SHA-1

Currently, when looking for a packed object from the pack idx, a
simple binary search is used.

A conventional binary search loop looks like this:

        unsigned lo, hi;
        do {
                unsigned mi = (lo + hi) / 2;
                int cmp = "entry pointed at by mi" minus "target";
                if (!cmp)
                        return mi; "mi is the wanted one"
                if (cmp > 0)
                        hi = mi; "mi is larger than target"
                else
                        lo = mi+1; "mi is smaller than target"
        } while (lo < hi);
	"did not find what we wanted"

The invariants are:

  - When entering the loop, 'lo' points at a slot that is never
    above the target (it could be at the target), 'hi' points at
    a slot that is guaranteed to be above the target (it can
    never be at the target).

  - We find a point 'mi' between 'lo' and 'hi' ('mi' could be
    the same as 'lo', but never can be as high as 'hi'), and
    check if 'mi' hits the target.  There are three cases:

     - if it is a hit, we have found what we are looking for;

     - if it is strictly higher than the target, we set it to
       'hi', and repeat the search.

     - if it is strictly lower than the target, we update 'lo'
       to one slot after it, because we allow 'lo' to be at the
       target and 'mi' is known to be below the target.

    If the loop exits, there is no matching entry.

When choosing 'mi', we do not have to take the "middle" but
anywhere in between 'lo' and 'hi', as long as lo <= mi < hi is
satisfied.  When we somehow know that the distance between the
target and 'lo' is much shorter than the target and 'hi', we
could pick 'mi' that is much closer to 'lo' than (hi+lo)/2,
which a conventional binary search would pick.

This patch takes advantage of the fact that the SHA-1 is a good
hash function, and as long as there are enough entries in the
table, we can expect uniform distribution.  An entry that begins
with for example "deadbeef..." is much likely to appear much
later than in the midway of a reasonably populated table.  In
fact, it can be expected to be near 87% (222/256) from the top
of the table.

This is a work-in-progress and has switches to allow easier
experiments and debugging.  Exporting GIT_USE_LOOKUP environment
variable enables this code.

On my admittedly memory starved machine, with a partial KDE
repository (3.0G pack with 95M idx):

    $ GIT_USE_LOOKUP=t git log -800 --stat HEAD >/dev/null
    3.93user 0.16system 0:04.09elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+55588minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Without the patch, the numbers are:

    $ git log -800 --stat HEAD >/dev/null
    4.00user 0.15system 0:04.17elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+60258minor)pagefaults 0swaps

In the same repository:

    $ GIT_USE_LOOKUP=t git log -2000 HEAD >/dev/null
    0.12user 0.00system 0:00.12elapsed 97%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+4241minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Without the patch, the numbers are:

    $ git log -2000 HEAD >/dev/null
    0.05user 0.01system 0:00.07elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
    0inputs+0outputs (0major+8506minor)pagefaults 0swaps

There isn't much time difference, but the number of minor faults
seems to show that we are touching much smaller number of pages,
which is expected.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions