The loose-objects task deletes loose objects that already exist in a
pack-file, then place the remaining loose objects into a new pack-file.
If this step runs all the time, then we risk creating pack-files with
very few objects with every 'git commit' process. To prevent
overwhelming the packs directory with small pack-files, place a minimum
number of objects to justify the task.
The 'maintenance.loose-objects.auto' config option specifies a minimum
number of loose objects to justify the task to run under the '--auto'
option. This defaults to 100 loose objects. Setting the value to zero
will prevent the step from running under '--auto' while a negative value
will force it to run every time.
Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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>
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
b40a50264a (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>
The 'git maintenance run' command has an '--auto' option. This is used
by other Git commands such as 'git commit' or 'git fetch' to check if
maintenance should be run after adding data to the repository.
Previously, this --auto option was only used to add the argument to the
'git gc' command as part of the 'gc' task. We will be expanding the
other tasks to perform a check to see if they should do work as part of
the --auto flag, when they are enabled by config.
First, update the 'gc' task to perform the auto check inside the
maintenance process. This prevents running an extra 'git gc --auto'
command when not needed. It also shows a model for other tasks.
Second, use the 'auto_condition' function pointer as a signal for
whether we enable the maintenance task under '--auto'. For instance, we
do not want to enable the 'fetch' task in '--auto' mode, so that
function pointer will remain NULL.
Now that we are not automatically calling 'git gc', a test in
t5514-fetch-multiple.sh must be changed to watch for 'git maintenance'
instead.
We continue to pass the '--auto' option to the 'git gc' command when
necessary, because of the gc.autoDetach config option changes behavior.
Likely, we will want to absorb the daemonizing behavior implied by
gc.autoDetach as a maintenance.autoDetach config option.
Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
Derrick Stolee