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.
