Currently this is not an improvement, but it allows for optimising
appendJournalFile later. With an optimised appendJournalFile, this will
greatly speed up access patterns like git-annex addurl of a lot of urls
to the same key, where the log file can grow rather large. Appending
rather than re-writing the journal file for each line can save a lot of
disk writes.
It still has to read the current journal or branch file, to check
if it can append to it, and so when the journal file does not exist yet,
it can write the old content from the branch to it. Probably the re-reads
are better cached by the filesystem than repeated writes. (If the
re-reads turn out to keep performance bad, they could be eliminated, at
the cost of not being able to compact the log when replacing old
information in it. That could be enabled by a switch.)
While the immediate need is to affect addurl writes, it was implemented
at the level of presence logs, so will also perhaps speed up location logs.
The only added overhead is the call to isNewInfo, which only needs to
compare ByteStrings. Helping to balance that out, it avoids compactLog
when it's able to append.
Sponsored-by: Dartmouth College's DANDI project
ce455223df