Limited to min of -JN or number of CPU cores, because it will often be
CPU bound, once it's read the gitignore file for a directory.
In some situations it's more disk bound, but in any case it's unlikely
to be the main bottleneck that -J is used to avoid. Eg, when dropping,
this is used for numcopies checks, but the main bottleneck will be
accessing the remotes to verify presence. So the user might decide to
-J32 that, but having 32 check-attr processes would just waste however
many filehandles they open, and probably worsen their performance due to
CPU contention.
Note that, I first tried just letting up to the -JN be started. However,
even when it's no bottleneck at all, that still results in all of them
being started. Why? Well, all the worker threads start up nearly
simulantaneously, so there's a thundering herd..
Avoid running a large number of git cat-file child processes when run with
a large -J value.
This implementation takes care to avoid adding any overhead to git-annex
when run without -J. When run with -J, there is a small bit of added
overhead, to manipulate the resource pool. That optimisation added a
fair bit of complexity.
Avoid repeatedly opening keys db when accessing a local git remote and -J
is used.
What was happening was that Remote.Git.onLocal created a new annex state
as each thread started up. The way the MVar was used did not prevent that.
And that, in turn, led to repeated opening of the keys db, as well as
probably other extra work or resource use.
Also managed to get rid of Annex.remoteannexstate, and it turned out there
was an unncessary Maybe in the keysdbhandle, since the handle starts out
closed.
This does mean that RemoteDaemon.Transport.Tor's call runs it, otherwise
no change, but this is groundwork for doing more such expensive actions
in dupState.
Fixes a failure mode where git-annex sync would try to run git-annex and
complain that it failed to find it in ~/.config/git-annex/program or PATH,
when there was a git-annex in /usr/bin/, but the original one was run
from elsewhere (eg, ~/bin) and happened not to be present any longer.
Now, it will fall back to using git-annex from PATH in such a case.
Which might fail due to some version incompatability, but still better
than a misleading error message.
Also made readProgramFile only read the file, not look for git-annex in
PATH as a fallback. That fallback may have confused Assistant.Upgrade,
which really wants the value from the file.
I doubt that warning has ever been right, but I'm sure it is not right
now.
For there to be a risk of git gc deleting objects that are in the annex
index, journal files would have to be staged into it, and deleted, but
the index not committed to the git-annex branch. And AFAICS, there is no
code path where that actually happens. I considered adding one recently,
but didn't.
The way it actually works is, as long as the user has annex.alwayscommit=false
the data lives in the journal, where it's safe from git gc. Then when
git-annex is run w/o that config, the journal is staged into the index,
which is immediately committed to the branch. There's no window where
git gc could delete the objects, because git gc only deletes objects
after some time (2 weeks by default).
Now, if git-annex gets suspended at just the wrong time, or interrupted,
then yes, it's possible. But doesn't matter whether that config was ever
set or not. And many uses of git-annex also recover from that situation
by committing to the git-annex branch.
A couple of these were probably actual bugs in edge cases. Most of the
changes I'm fine with. The fact that aeson's object returns sometihng
that we know will be an Object, but the type checker does not know is
kind of annoying.
The journal read optimisation in aeca7c220 later got fixed in eedd73b84
to stage and commit any files that were left in the journal by a
previous git-annex run. That's necessary for the optimisation to work
correctly. But it also meant that alwayscommit=false started committing
the previous git-annex processes journalled changes, which defeated the
purpose of the config setting entirely.
So, disable the optimisation when alwayscommit=false, leaving the
files in the journal and not committing them. See my comments on the bug
report for why this seemed the best approach.
Also fixes a problem when annex.merge-annex-branches=false and there
are changes in the journal. That config indirectly prevents committing
the journal. (Which seems a bit odd given its name, but it always has..)
So, when there were changes in the journal, perhaps left there due to
alwayscommit=false being set before, the optimisation would prevent
git-annex from reading the journal files, and it would operate with out
of date information.