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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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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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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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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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Derrick Stolee