Before, a merge was first calculated, by running various actions that
called git and built up a list of lines, which were at the end sent
to git update-index. This necessarily used space proportional to the size
of the diff between the trees being merged.
Now, lines are streamed into git update-index from each of the actions in
turn.
Runtime size of git-annex merge when merging 50000 location log files
drops from around 100 mb to a constant 4 mb.
Presumably it runs quite a lot faster, too.
This reduces the memory use of a merge by 1/3rd. The space leak was
apparently because the whole update-index input was generated strictly, not
lazily.
I wondered if the change to ByteStrings contributed to this, due to the
need to convert with L.pack here. But going back to the old code, I still
see a much similar leak, and worse performance besides due to it not using
ByteStrings.
The fix is to just hPutStr the lines repeatedly. (Note the \0 is written
separately, to avoid allocation overheads in adding it to the string.)
The Git.pipeWrite interface is probably just wrong for any large inputs to
git. This was the only place using it for input of any size.
There is still at least one other space leak in the merge code.
Many functions took the repo as their first parameter. Changing it
consistently to be the last parameter allows doing some useful things with
currying, that reduce boilerplate.
In particular, g <- gitRepo is almost never needed now, instead
use inRepo to run an IO action in the repo, and fromRepo to get
a value from the repo.
This also provides more opportunities to use monadic and applicative
combinators.
This yields a second or so speedup in unused, find, etc. Seems that even
when the ByteString is immediately split and then converted to Strings,
it's faster.
I may try to push ByteStrings out into more of git-annex gradually,
although I suspect most of the time-critical parts are already covered
now, and many of the rest rely on libraries that only support Strings.
Added Git.ByteString which replaces Git IO methods with ones using lazy
ByteStrings. This can be more efficient when large quantities of data are
being read from git.
In Git.LsTree, parse git ls-tree output more efficiently, thanks
to ByteString. This benchmarks 25% faster, in a benchmark that includes
(probably predominately) the run time for git ls-tree itself.
In real world numbers, this makes git annex unused 2 seconds faster for
each branch it needs to check, in my usual large repo.
This was more complex than would be expected. unannex has to use git commit -a
since it's removing files from git; git commit filelist won't do.
Allow commands to be added to the Git queue that have no associated files,
and run such commands once.
