47 lines
2.2 KiB
Text
47 lines
2.2 KiB
Text
[[!comment format=mdwn
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username="joey"
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subject="""comment 1"""
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date="2016-09-21T17:53:12Z"
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content="""
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(Let's not discuss the behavior of copy --to when the file is not locally
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present here; there is plenty of other discussion of that in eg
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<http://bugs.debian.org/671179>)
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git-annex's special remote API does not allow remote-to-remote transfers
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without spooling it to a file on disk first. And it's not possible to do
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using rsync on either end, AFAICS. It would be possible in some other cases
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but this would need to be implemented for each type of remote as a new API
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call.
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Modern systems tend to have quite a large disk cache, so it's quite
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possible that going via a temp file on disk is not going to use a lot of
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disk IO to write and read it when the read and write occur fairly close
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together.
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The main benefit from streaming would probably be if it could run the
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download and the upload concurrently. But that would only be a benefit
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sometimes. With an asymmetric connection, saturating the uplink tends to
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swamp downloads. Also, if download is faster than upload, it would have to
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throttle downloads (which complicates the remote API much more), or buffer
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them to memory (which has its own complications).
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Streaming the download to the upload would at best speed things up by a
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factor of 2. It would probably work nearly as well to upload the previously
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downloaded file while downloading the next file.
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It would not be super hard to make `git annex copy --from --to` download a file,
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upload it, and then drop it, and parallelizing it with -J2 would
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keep both the --from and --to remotes bandwidth saturated pretty well.
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Alhough not perfectly, because two jobs could both be downloading while
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the uplink is left idle. To make it optimal, it would need to do the
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download and when done, push the upload+drop into another queue of actions
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that is processed concurrently with other downloads.
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And there is a complication with running that at the same time as eg `git
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annex get` of the same file. It would be surprising for get to succeed
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(because copy has already temporarily downloaded the file) and then have
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the file later get dropped. So, it seems that `copy --from --to` would need
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to stash the content away in a temp file somewhere instead of storing it
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in the annex proper.
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"""]]
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