Much of the memory bloat turned out to be due to getKeysReferenced
containing a mapM, which is strict and buffered the whole list
rather than streaming it.
The other half of the bloat was due to building a temporary Set
in order to call S.difference. While that is more cpu efficient,
I switched to successive S.delete, since with it, I can run a whole
git annex unused in less than 8 mb of memory.
The whole Set of keys with content available is still stored in memory,
so running unused in a repo with a whole lot of file content will still
use more memory. In a repo containing 6000 files, it needed 40 mb.
Note that the status command still uses the bloatful getKeysReferenced.
Ssh connection caching is now enabled automatically by git-annex. Only one
ssh connection is made to each host per git-annex run, which can speed some
things up a lot, as well as avoiding repeated password prompts. Concurrent
git-annex processes also share ssh connections. Cached ssh connections are
shut down when git-annex exits.
Note: The rsync special remote does not yet participate in the ssh
connection caching.
Avoids doing auto-merging in commands that don't need fully current
information from the git-annex branch. In particular, git annex add no
longer needs to auto-merge. Affected commands: Anything that doesn't
look up data from the branch, but does write a change to it.
It might seem counterintuitive that we can change a value without first
making sure we have the current value. This optimisation works because
these two sequences are equivilant:
1. pull from remote
2. union merge
3. read file from branch
4. modify file and write to branch
vs.
1. read file from branch
2. modify file and write to branch
3. pull from remote
4. union merge
After either sequence, the git-annex branch contains the same logical content
for the modified file. (Possibly with lines in a different order or
additional old lines of course).