8320b1dbe7
This patch fixes a quadratic list insertion in rewrite_one() when
pathspec limiting is combined with --parents. What happens is something
like this:
1. We see that some commit X touches the path, so we try to rewrite
its parents.
2. rewrite_one() loops forever, rewriting parents, until it finds a
relevant parent (or hits the root and decides there are none). The
heavy lifting is done by process_parent(), which uses
try_to_simplify_commit() to drop parents.
3. process_parent() puts any intermediate parents into the
&revs->commits list, inserting by commit date as usual.
So if commit X is recent, and then there's a large chunk of history that
doesn't touch the path, we may add a lot of commits to &revs->commits.
And insertion by commit date is O(n) in the worst case, making the whole
thing quadratic.
We tried to deal with this long ago in fce87ae538 (Fix quadratic
performance in rewrite_one., 2008-07-12). In that scheme, we cache the
oldest commit in the list; if the new commit to be added is older, we
can start our linear traversal there. This often works well in practice
because parents are older than their descendants, and thus we tend to
add older and older commits as we traverse.
But this isn't guaranteed, and in fact there's a simple case where it is
not: merges. Imagine we look at the first parent of a merge and see a
very old commit (let's say 3 years old). And on the second parent, as we
go back 3 years in history, we might have many commits. That one
first-parent commit has polluted our oldest-commit cache; it will remain
the oldest while we traverse a huge chunk of history, during which we
have to fall back to the slow, linear method of adding to the list.
Naively, one might imagine that instead of caching the oldest commit,
we'd start at the last-added one. But that just makes some cases faster
while making others slower (and indeed, while it made a real-world test
case much faster, it does quite poorly in the perf test include here).
Fundamentally, these are just heuristics; our worst case is still
quadratic, and some cases will approach that.
Instead, let's use a data structure with better worst-case performance.
Swapping out revs->commits for something else would have repercussions
all over the code base, but we can take advantage of one fact: for the
rewrite_one() case, nobody actually needs to see those commits in
revs->commits until we've finished generating the whole list.
That leaves us with two obvious options:
1. We can generate the list _unordered_, which should be O(n), and
then sort it afterwards, which would be O(n log n) total. This is
"sort-after" below.
2. We can insert the commits into a separate data structure, like a
priority queue. This is "prio-queue" below.
I expected that sort-after would be the fastest (since it saves us the
extra step of copying the items into the linked list), but surprisingly
the prio-queue seems to be a bit faster.
Here are timings for the new p0001.6 for all three techniques across a
few repositories, as compared to master:
master cache-last sort-after prio-queue
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GIT_PERF_REPO=git.git
0.52(0.50+0.02) 0.53(0.51+0.02) +1.9% 0.37(0.33+0.03) -28.8% 0.37(0.32+0.04) -28.8%
GIT_PERF_REPO=linux.git
20.81(20.74+0.07) 20.31(20.24+0.07) -2.4% 0.94(0.86+0.07) -95.5% 0.91(0.82+0.09) -95.6%
GIT_PERF_REPO=llvm-project.git
83.67(83.57+0.09) 4.23(4.15+0.08) -94.9% 3.21(3.15+0.06) -96.2% 2.98(2.91+0.07) -96.4%
A few items to note:
- the cache-list tweak does improve the bad case for llvm-project.git
that started my digging into this problem. But it performs terribly
on linux.git, barely helping at all.
- the sort-after and prio-queue techniques work well. They approach
the timing for running without --parents at all, which is what you'd
expect (see below for more data).
- prio-queue just barely outperforms sort-after. As I said, I'm not
really sure why this is the case, but it is. You can see it even
more prominently in this real-world case on llvm-project.git:
git rev-list --parents 07ef786652e7 -- llvm/test/CodeGen/Generic/bswap.ll
where prio-queue routinely outperforms sort-after by about 7%. One
guess is that the prio-queue may just be more efficient because it
uses a compact array.
There are three new perf tests:
- "rev-list --parents" gives us a baseline for running with --parents.
This isn't sped up meaningfully here, because the bad case is
triggered only with simplification. But it's good to make sure we
don't screw it up (now, or in the future).
- "rev-list -- dummy" gives us a baseline for just traversing with
pathspec limiting. This gives a lower bound for the next test (and
it's also a good thing for us to be checking in general for
regressions, since we don't seem to have any existing tests).
- "rev-list --parents -- dummy" shows off the problem (and our fix)
Here are the timings for those three on llvm-project.git, before and
after the fix:
Test master prio-queue
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0001.3: rev-list --parents 2.24(2.12+0.12) 2.22(2.11+0.11) -0.9%
0001.5: rev-list -- dummy 2.89(2.82+0.07) 2.92(2.89+0.03) +1.0%
0001.6: rev-list --parents -- dummy 83.67(83.57+0.09) 2.98(2.91+0.07) -96.4%
Changes in the first two are basically noise, and you can see we
approach our lower bound in the final one.
Note that we can't fully get rid of the list argument from
process_parents(). Other callers do have lists, and it would be hard to
convert them. They also don't seem to have this problem (probably
because they actually remove items from the list as they loop, meaning
it doesn't grow so large in the first place). So this basically just
drops the "cache_ptr" parameter (which was used only by the one caller
we're fixing here) and replaces it with a prio_queue. Callers are free
to use either data structure, depending on what they're prepared to
handle.
Reported-by: Björn Pettersson A <bjorn.a.pettersson@ericsson.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Git - fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
Git is a fast, scalable, distributed revision control system with an unusually rich command set that provides both high-level operations and full access to internals.
Git is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License version 2 (some parts of it are under different licenses, compatible with the GPLv2). It was originally written by Linus Torvalds with help of a group of hackers around the net.
Please read the file INSTALL for installation instructions.
Many Git online resources are accessible from https://git-scm.com/ including full documentation and Git related tools.
See Documentation/gittutorial.txt to get started, then see
Documentation/giteveryday.txt for a useful minimum set of commands, and
Documentation/git-.txt for documentation of each command.
If git has been correctly installed, then the tutorial can also be
read with man gittutorial or git help tutorial, and the
documentation of each command with man git-<commandname> or git help <commandname>.
CVS users may also want to read Documentation/gitcvs-migration.txt
(man gitcvs-migration or git help cvs-migration if git is
installed).
The user discussion and development of Git take place on the Git mailing list -- everyone is welcome to post bug reports, feature requests, comments and patches to git@vger.kernel.org (read Documentation/SubmittingPatches for instructions on patch submission). To subscribe to the list, send an email with just "subscribe git" in the body to majordomo@vger.kernel.org. The mailing list archives are available at https://public-inbox.org/git/, http://marc.info/?l=git and other archival sites.
Issues which are security relevant should be disclosed privately to the Git Security mailing list git-security@googlegroups.com.
The maintainer frequently sends the "What's cooking" reports that list the current status of various development topics to the mailing list. The discussion following them give a good reference for project status, development direction and remaining tasks.
The name "git" was given by Linus Torvalds when he wrote the very first version. He described the tool as "the stupid content tracker" and the name as (depending on your mood):
- random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronunciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
- stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang.
- "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
- "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks