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2020-12-21git-maintenance.txt: add missing wordLibravatar Martin Ågren1-1/+1
Add a missing "a" before "bunch". Signed-off-by: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com> Acked-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-10-16maintenance: add troubleshooting guide to docsLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+44
The 'git maintenance run' subcommand takes a lock on the object database to prevent concurrent processes from competing for resources. This is an important safety measure to prevent possible repository corruption and data loss. This feature can lead to confusing behavior if a user is not aware of it. Add a TROUBLESHOOTING section to the 'git maintenance' builtin documentation that discusses these tradeoffs. The short version of this section is that Git will not corrupt your repository, but if the list of scheduled tasks takes longer than an hour then some scheduled tasks may be dropped due to this object database collision. For example, a long-running "daily" task at midnight might prevent an "hourly" task from running at 1AM. The opposite is also possible, but less likely as long as the "hourly" tasks are much faster than the "daily" and "weekly" tasks. Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-10-16maintenance: use 'incremental' strategy by defaultLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+17
The 'git maintenance (register|start)' subcommands add the current repository to the global Git config so maintenance will operate on that repository. It does not specify what maintenance should occur or how often. To make it simple for users to start background maintenance with a recommended schedlue, update the 'maintenance.strategy' config option in both the 'register' and 'start' subcommands. This allows users to customize beyond the defaults using individual 'maintenance.<task>.schedule' options, but also the user can opt-out of this strategy using 'maintenance.strategy=none'. Helped-by: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-25maintenance: add start/stop subcommandsLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+11
Add new subcommands to 'git maintenance' that start or stop background maintenance using 'cron', when available. This integration is as simple as I could make it, barring some implementation complications. The schedule is laid out as follows: 0 1-23 * * * $cmd maintenance run --schedule=hourly 0 0 * * 1-6 $cmd maintenance run --schedule=daily 0 0 * * 0 $cmd maintenance run --schedule=weekly where $cmd is a properly-qualified 'git for-each-repo' execution: $cmd=$path/git --exec-path=$path for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo where $path points to the location of the Git executable running 'git maintenance start'. This is critical for systems with multiple versions of Git. Specifically, macOS has a system version at '/usr/bin/git' while the version that users can install resides at '/usr/local/bin/git' (symlinked to '/usr/local/libexec/git-core/git'). This will also use your locally-built version if you build and run this in your development environment without installing first. This conditional schedule avoids having cron launch multiple 'git for-each-repo' commands in parallel. Such parallel commands would likely lead to the 'hourly' and 'daily' tasks competing over the object database lock. This could lead to to some tasks never being run! Since the --schedule=<frequency> argument will run all tasks with _at least_ the given frequency, the daily runs will also run the hourly tasks. Similarly, the weekly runs will also run the daily and hourly tasks. The GIT_TEST_CRONTAB environment variable is not intended for users to edit, but instead as a way to mock the 'crontab [-l]' command. This variable is set in test-lib.sh to avoid a future test from accidentally running anything with the cron integration from modifying the user's schedule. We use GIT_TEST_CRONTAB='test-tool crontab <file>' in our tests to check how the schedule is modified in 'git maintenance (start|stop)' commands. Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-25maintenance: add [un]register subcommandsLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+14
In preparation for launching background maintenance from the 'git maintenance' builtin, create register/unregister subcommands. These commands update the new 'maintenance.repos' config option in the global config so the background maintenance job knows which repositories to maintain. These commands allow users to add a repository to the background maintenance list without disrupting the actual maintenance mechanism. For example, a user can run 'git maintenance register' when no background maintenance is running and it will not start the background maintenance. A later update to start running background maintenance will then pick up this repository automatically. The opposite example is that a user can run 'git maintenance unregister' to remove the current repository from background maintenance without halting maintenance for other repositories. Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-25maintenance: add --schedule option and configLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-1/+12
Maintenance currently triggers when certain data-size thresholds are met, such as number of pack-files or loose objects. Users may want to run certain maintenance tasks based on frequency instead. For example, a user may want to perform a 'prefetch' task every hour, or 'gc' task every day. To help these users, update the 'git maintenance run' command to include a '--schedule=<frequency>' option. The allowed frequencies are 'hourly', 'daily', and 'weekly'. These values are also allowed in a new config value 'maintenance.<task>.schedule'. The 'git maintenance run --schedule=<frequency>' checks the '*.schedule' config value for each enabled task to see if the configured frequency is at least as frequent as the frequency from the '--schedule' argument. We use the following order, for full clarity: 'hourly' > 'daily' > 'weekly' Use new 'enum schedule_priority' to track these values numerically. The following cron table would run the scheduled tasks with the correct frequencies: 0 1-23 * * * git -C <repo> maintenance run --schedule=hourly 0 0 * * 1-6 git -C <repo> maintenance run --schedule=daily 0 0 * * 0 git -C <repo> maintenance run --schedule=weekly This cron schedule will run --schedule=hourly every hour except at midnight. This avoids a concurrent run with the --schedule=daily that runs at midnight every day except the first day of the week. This avoids a concurrent run with the --schedule=weekly that runs at midnight on the first day of the week. Since --schedule=daily also runs the 'hourly' tasks and --schedule=weekly runs the 'hourly' and 'daily' tasks, we will still see all tasks run with the proper frequencies. Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-25maintenance: add incremental-repack taskLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+18
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>
2020-09-25maintenance: add loose-objects taskLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+15
One goal of background maintenance jobs is to allow a user to disable auto-gc (gc.auto=0) but keep their repository in a clean state. Without any cleanup, loose objects will clutter the object database and slow operations. In addition, the loose objects will take up extra space because they are not stored with deltas against similar objects. Create a 'loose-objects' task for the 'git maintenance run' command. This helps clean up loose objects without disrupting concurrent Git commands using the following sequence of events: 1. Run 'git prune-packed' to delete any loose objects that exist in a pack-file. Concurrent commands will prefer the packed version of the object to the loose version. (Of course, there are exceptions for commands that specifically care about the location of an object. These are rare for a user to run on purpose, and we hope a user that has selected background maintenance will not be trying to do foreground maintenance.) 2. Run 'git pack-objects' on a batch of loose objects. These objects are grouped by scanning the loose object directories in lexicographic order until listing all loose objects -or- reaching 50,000 objects. This is more than enough if the loose objects are created only by a user doing normal development. We noticed users with _millions_ of loose objects because VFS for Git downloads blobs on-demand when a file read operation requires populating a virtual file. This step is based on a similar step in Scalar [1] and VFS for Git. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/scalar/blob/master/Scalar.Common/Maintenance/LooseObjectsStep.cs Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-25maintenance: add prefetch taskLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+15
When working with very large repositories, an incremental 'git fetch' command can download a large amount of data. If there are many other users pushing to a common repo, then this data can rival the initial pack-file size of a 'git clone' of a medium-size repo. Users may want to keep the data on their local repos as close as possible to the data on the remote repos by fetching periodically in the background. This can break up a large daily fetch into several smaller hourly fetches. The task is called "prefetch" because it is work done in advance of a foreground fetch to make that 'git fetch' command much faster. However, if we simply ran 'git fetch <remote>' in the background, then the user running a foreground 'git fetch <remote>' would lose some important feedback when a new branch appears or an existing branch updates. This is especially true if a remote branch is force-updated and this isn't noticed by the user because it occurred in the background. Further, the functionality of 'git push --force-with-lease' becomes suspect. When running 'git fetch <remote> <options>' in the background, use the following options for careful updating: 1. --no-tags prevents getting a new tag when a user wants to see the new tags appear in their foreground fetches. 2. --refmap= removes the configured refspec which usually updates refs/remotes/<remote>/* with the refs advertised by the remote. While this looks confusing, this was documented and tested by b40a50264ac (fetch: document and test --refmap="", 2020-01-21), including this sentence in the documentation: Providing an empty `<refspec>` to the `--refmap` option causes Git to ignore the configured refspecs and rely entirely on the refspecs supplied as command-line arguments. 3. By adding a new refspec "+refs/heads/*:refs/prefetch/<remote>/*" we can ensure that we actually load the new values somewhere in our refspace while not updating refs/heads or refs/remotes. By storing these refs here, the commit-graph job will update the commit-graph with the commits from these hidden refs. 4. --prune will delete the refs/prefetch/<remote> refs that no longer appear on the remote. 5. --no-write-fetch-head prevents updating FETCH_HEAD. We've been using this step as a critical background job in Scalar [1] (and VFS for Git). This solved a pain point that was showing up in user reports: fetching was a pain! Users do not like waiting to download the data that was created while they were away from their machines. After implementing background fetch, the foreground fetch commands sped up significantly because they mostly just update refs and download a small amount of new data. The effect is especially dramatic when paried with --no-show-forced-udpates (through fetch.showForcedUpdates=false). [1] https://github.com/microsoft/scalar/blob/master/Scalar.Common/Maintenance/FetchStep.cs Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-17maintenance: create maintenance.<task>.enabled configLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-5/+9
Currently, a normal run of "git maintenance run" will only run the 'gc' task, as it is the only one enabled. This is mostly for backwards- compatible reasons since "git maintenance run --auto" commands replaced previous "git gc --auto" commands after some Git processes. Users could manually run specific maintenance tasks by calling "git maintenance run --task=<task>" directly. Allow users to customize which steps are run automatically using config. The 'maintenance.<task>.enabled' option then can turn on these other tasks (or turn off the 'gc' task). Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-17maintenance: add --task optionLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-1/+8
A user may want to only run certain maintenance tasks in a certain order. Add the --task=<task> option, which allows a user to specify an ordered list of tasks to run. These cannot be run multiple times, however. Here is where our array of maintenance_task pointers becomes critical. We can sort the array of pointers based on the task order, but we do not want to move the struct data itself in order to preserve the hashmap references. We use the hashmap to match the --task=<task> arguments into the task struct data. Keep in mind that the 'enabled' member of the maintenance_task struct is a placeholder for a future 'maintenance.<task>.enabled' config option. Thus, we use the 'enabled' member to specify which tasks are run when the user does not specify any --task=<task> arguments. The 'enabled' member should be ignored if --task=<task> appears. Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-17maintenance: add commit-graph taskLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+8
The first new task in the 'git maintenance' builtin is the 'commit-graph' task. This updates the commit-graph file incrementally with the command git commit-graph write --reachable --split By writing an incremental commit-graph file using the "--split" option we minimize the disruption from this operation. The default behavior is to merge layers until the new "top" layer is less than half the size of the layer below. This provides quick writes most of the time, with the longer writes following a power law distribution. Most importantly, concurrent Git processes only look at the commit-graph-chain file for a very short amount of time, so they will verly likely not be holding a handle to the file when we try to replace it. (This only matters on Windows.) If a concurrent process reads the old commit-graph-chain file, but our job expires some of the .graph files before they can be read, then those processes will see a warning message (but not fail). This could be avoided by a future update to use the --expire-time argument when writing the commit-graph. Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-17maintenance: add --quiet optionLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+3
Maintenance activities are commonly used as steps in larger scripts. Providing a '--quiet' option allows those scripts to be less noisy when run on a terminal window. Turn this mode on by default when stderr is not a terminal. Pipe the option to the 'git gc' child process. Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2020-09-17maintenance: create basic maintenance runnerLibravatar Derrick Stolee1-0/+57
The 'gc' builtin is our current entrypoint for automatically maintaining a repository. This one tool does many operations, such as repacking the repository, packing refs, and rewriting the commit-graph file. The name implies it performs "garbage collection" which means several different things, and some users may not want to use this operation that rewrites the entire object database. Create a new 'maintenance' builtin that will become a more general- purpose command. To start, it will only support the 'run' subcommand, but will later expand to add subcommands for scheduling maintenance in the background. For now, the 'maintenance' builtin is a thin shim over the 'gc' builtin. In fact, the only option is the '--auto' toggle, which is handed directly to the 'gc' builtin. The current change is isolated to this simple operation to prevent more interesting logic from being lost in all of the boilerplate of adding a new builtin. Use existing builtin/gc.c file because we want to share code between the two builtins. It is possible that we will have 'maintenance' replace the 'gc' builtin entirely at some point, leaving 'git gc' as an alias for some specific arguments to 'git maintenance run'. Create a new test_subcommand helper that allows us to test if a certain subcommand was run. It requires storing the GIT_TRACE2_EVENT logs in a file. A negation mode is available that will be used in later tests. Helped-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>