When running eg git-annex get, for each file it has to read from and
write to the keys database. But it's reading exclusively from one table,
and writing to a different table. So, it is not necessary to flush the
write to the database before reading. This avoids writing the database
once per file, instead it will buffer 1000 changes before writing.
Benchmarking getting 1000 small files from a local origin,
git-annex get now takes 13.62s, down from 22.41s!
git-annex drop now takes 9.07s, down from 18.63s!
Wowowowowowowow!
(It would perhaps have been better if there were separate databases for
the two tables. At least it would have avoided this complexity. Ah well,
this is better than splitting the table in a annex.version upgrade.)
Sponsored-by: Dartmouth College's Datalad project
