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2017-09-06tempfile: use list.h for linked listLibravatar Jeff King1-0/+38
The tempfile API keeps to-be-cleaned tempfiles in a singly-linked list and never removes items from the list. A future patch would like to start removing items, but removal from a singly linked list is O(n), as we have to walk the list to find the predecessor element. This means that a process which takes "n" simultaneous lockfiles (for example, an atomic transaction on "n" refs) may end up quadratic in "n". Before we start allowing items to be removed, it would be nice to have a way to cover this case in linear time. The simplest solution is to make an assumption about the order in which tempfiles are added and removed from the list. If both operations iterate over the tempfiles in the same order, then by putting new items at the end of the list our removal search will always find its items at the beginning of the list. And indeed, that would work for the case of refs. But it creates a hidden dependency between unrelated parts of the code. If anybody changes the ref code (or if we add a new caller that opens multiple simultaneous tempfiles) they may unknowingly introduce a performance regression. Another solution is to use a better data structure. A doubly-linked list works fine, and we already have an implementation in list.h. But there's one snag: the elements of "struct tempfile" are all marked as "volatile", since a signal handler may interrupt us and iterate over the list at any moment (even if we were in the middle of adding a new entry). We can declare a "volatile struct list_head", but we can't actually use it with the normal list functions. The compiler complains about passing a pointer-to-volatile via a regular pointer argument. And rightfully so, as the sub-function would potentially need different code to deal with the volatile case. That leaves us with a few options: 1. Drop the "volatile" modifier for the list items. This is probably a bad idea. I checked the assembly output from "gcc -O2", and the "volatile" really does impact the order in which it updates memory. 2. Use macros instead of inline functions. The irony here is that list.h is entirely implemented as trivial inline functions. So we basically are already generating custom code for each call. But sadly there's no way in C to declare the inline function to take a more generic type. We could do so by switching the inline functions to macros, but it does make the end result harder to read. And it doesn't fully solve the problem (for instance, the declaration of list_head needs to change so that its "prev" and "next" pointers point to other volatile structs). 3. Don't use list.h, and just make our own ad-hoc doubly-linked list. It's not that much code to implement the basics that we need here. But if we're going to do so, why not add the few extra lines required to model it after the actual list.h interface? We can even reuse a few of the macro helpers. So this patch takes option 3, but actually implements a parallel "volatile list" interface in list.h, where it could potentially be reused by other code. This implements just enough for tempfile.c's use, though we could easily port other functions later if need be. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-07-18list: avoid incompatibility with *BSD sys/queue.hLibravatar Eric Wong1-0/+2
The OS X build pulls in sys/queue.h, which pollutes the preprocessor namespace with a macro generically named LIST_HEAD, and clashes with the name we use here. ref: http://mid.gmane.org/FB76544F-16F7-45CA-9649-FD62EE44B0DE@gmail.com Reported-by: Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-07-12http-walker: reduce O(n) ops with doubly-linked listLibravatar Eric Wong1-0/+164
Using the a Linux-kernel-derived doubly-linked list implementation from the Userspace RCU library allows us to enqueue and delete items from the object request queue in constant time. This change reduces enqueue times in the prefetch() function where object request queue could grow to several thousand objects. I left out the list_for_each_entry* family macros from list.h which relied on the __typeof__ operator as we support platforms without it. Thus, list_entry (aka "container_of") needs to be called explicitly inside macro-wrapped for loops. The downside is this costs us an additional pointer per object request, but this is offset by reduced overhead on queue operations leading to improved performance and shorter queue depths. Signed-off-by: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>