Writes are optimised by queueing up multiple writes when possible.
The queue is flushed after the Annex monad action finishes. That makes it
happen on program termination, and also whenever a nested Annex monad action
finishes.
Reads are optimised by checking once (per AnnexState) if the database
exists. If the database doesn't exist yet, all reads return mempty.
Reads also cause queued writes to be flushed, so reads will always be
consistent with writes (as long as they're made inside the same Annex monad).
A future optimisation path would be to determine when that's not necessary,
which is probably most of the time, and avoid flushing unncessarily.
Design notes for this commit:
- separate reads from writes
- reuse a handle which is left open until program
exit or until the MVar goes out of scope (and autoclosed then)
- writes are queued
- queue is flushed periodically
- immediate queue flush before any read
- auto-flush queue when database handle is garbage collected
- flush queue on exit from Annex monad
(Note that this may happen repeatedly for a single database connection;
or a connection may be reused for multiple Annex monad actions,
possibly even concurrent ones.)
- if database does not exist (or is empty) the handle
is not opened by reads; reads instead return empty results
- writes open the handle if it was not open previously
Fsck can use the queue for efficiency since it is write-heavy, and only
reads a value before writing it. But, the queue is not suited to the Keys
database.
