The git-gc(1) command has been introduced in the early days of Git in
30f610b7b0 (Create 'git gc' to perform common maintenance operations.,
2006-12-27) as the main repository maintenance utility. And while the
tool has of course evolved since then to cover new parts, the basic
strategy it uses has never really changed much.
It is safe to say that since 2006 the Git ecosystem has changed quite a
bit. Repositories tend to be much larger nowadays than they have been
almost 20 years ago, and large parts of the industry went crazy for
monorepos (for various wildly different definitions of "monorepo"). So
the maintenance strategy we used back then may not be the best fit
nowadays anymore.
Arguably, most of the maintenance tasks that git-gc(1) does are still
perfectly fine today: repacking references, expiring various data
structures and things like tend to not cause huge problems. But the big
exception is the way we repack objects.
git-gc(1) by default uses a split strategy: it performs incremental
repacks by default, and then whenever we have too many packs we perform
a large all-into-one repack. This all-into-one repack is what is causing
problems nowadays, as it is an operation that is quite expensive. While
it is wasteful in small- and medium-sized repositories, in large repos
it may even be prohibitively expensive.
We have eventually introduced git-maintenance(1) that was slated as a
replacement for git-gc(1). In contrast to git-gc(1), it is much more
flexible as it is structured around configurable tasks and strategies.
So while its default "gc" strategy still uses git-gc(1) under the hood,
it allows us to iterate.
A second strategy it knows about is the "incremental" strategy, which we
configure when registering a repository for scheduled maintenance. This
strategy isn't really a full replacement for git-gc(1) though, as it
doesn't know to expire unused data structures. In Git 2.52 we have thus
introduced a new "geometric" strategy that is a proper replacement for
the old git-gc(1).
In contrast to the incremental/all-into-one split used by git-gc(1), the
new "geometric" strategy maintains a geometric progression of packfiles,
which significantly reduces the number of all-into-one repacks that we
have to perform in large repositories. It is thus a much better fit for
large repositories than git-gc(1).
Note that the "geometric" strategy isn't perfect though: while we
perform way less all-into-one repacks compared to git-gc(1), we still
have to perform them eventually. But for the largest repositories out
there this may not be an option either, as client machines might not be
powerful enough to perform such a repack in the first place. These cases
would thus still be covered by the "incremental" strategy.
Switch the default strategy away from "gc" to "geometric", but retain
the "incremental" strategy configured when registering background
maintenance with `git maintenance register`.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We have two different repacking strategies in Git:
- The "gc" strategy uses git-gc(1).
- The "incremental" strategy uses multi-pack indices and `git
multi-pack-index repack` to merge together smaller packfiles as
determined by a specific batch size.
The former strategy is our old and trusted default, whereas the latter
has historically been used for our scheduled maintenance. But both
strategies have their shortcomings:
- The "gc" strategy performs regular all-into-one repacks. Furthermore
it is rather inflexible, as it is not easily possible for a user to
enable or disable specific subtasks.
- The "incremental" strategy is not a full replacement for the "gc"
strategy as it doesn't know to prune stale data.
So today, we don't have a strategy that is well-suited for large repos
while being a full replacement for the "gc" strategy.
Introduce a new "geometric" strategy that aims to fill this gap. This
strategy invokes all the usual cleanup tasks that git-gc(1) does like
pruning reflogs and rerere caches as well as stale worktrees. But where
it differs from both the "gc" and "incremental" strategy is that it uses
our geometric repacking infrastructure exposed by git-repack(1) to
repack packfiles. The advantage of geometric repacking is that we only
need to perform an all-into-one repack when the object count in a repo
has grown significantly.
One downside of this strategy is that pruning of unreferenced objects is
not going to happen regularly anymore. Every geometric repack knows to
soak up all loose objects regardless of their reachability, and merging
two or more packs doesn't consider reachability, either. Consequently,
the number of unreachable objects will grow over time.
This is remedied by doing an all-into-one repack instead of a geometric
repack whenever we determine that the geometric repack would end up
merging all packfiles anyway. This all-into-one repack then performs our
usual reachability checks and writes unreachable objects into a cruft
pack. As cruft packs won't ever be merged during geometric repacks we
can thus phase out these objects over time.
Of course, this still means that we retain unreachable objects for far
longer than with the "gc" strategy. But the maintenance strategy is
intended especially for large repositories, where the basic assumption
is that the set of unreachable objects will be significantly dwarfed by
the number of reachable objects.
If this assumption is ever proven to be too disadvantageous we could for
example introduce a time-based strategy: if the largest packfile has not
been touched for longer than $T, we perform an all-into-one repack. But
for now, such a mechanism is deferred into the future as it is not clear
yet whether it is needed in the first place.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
While the user can pick the "incremental" maintenance strategy, it is
not possible to explicitly use the "gc" strategy. This has two
downsides:
- It is impossible to use the default "gc" strategy for a specific
repository when the strategy was globally set to a different strategy.
- It is not possible to use git-gc(1) for scheduled maintenance.
Address these issues by making making the "gc" strategy configurable.
Furthermore, extend the strategy so that git-gc(1) runs for both manual
and scheduled maintenance.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The "maintenance.strategy" configuration allows users to configure how
Git is supposed to perform repository maintenance. The idea is that we
provide a set of high-level strategies that may be useful in different
contexts, like for example when handling a large monorepo. Furthermore,
the strategy can be tweaked by the user by overriding specific tasks.
In its current form though, the strategy only applies to scheduled
maintenance. This creates something of a gap, as scheduled and manual
maintenance will now use _different_ strategies as the latter would
continue to use git-gc(1) by default. This makes the strategies way less
useful than they could be on the one hand. But even more importantly,
the two different strategies might clash with one another, where one of
the strategies performs maintenance in such a way that it discards
benefits from the other strategy.
So ideally, it should be possible to pick one strategy that then applies
globally to all the different ways that we perform maintenance. This
doesn't necessarily mean that the strategy always does the _same_ thing
for every maintenance type. But it means that the strategy can configure
the different types to work in tandem with each other.
Change the meaning of "maintenance.strategy" accordingly so that the
strategy is applied to both types, manual and scheduled. As preceding
commits have introduced logic to run maintenance tasks depending on this
type we can tweak strategies so that they perform those tasks depending
on the context.
Note that this raises the question of backwards compatibility: when the
user has configured the "incremental" strategy we would have ignored
that strategy beforehand. Instead, repository maintenance would have
continued to use git-gc(1) by default.
But luckily, we can match that behaviour by:
- Keeping all current tasks of the incremental strategy as
`MAINTENANCE_TYPE_SCHEDULED`. This ensures that those tasks will not
run during manual maintenance.
- Configuring the "gc" task so that it is invoked during manual
maintenance.
Like this, the user shouldn't observe any difference in behaviour.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The geometric repacking task uses a factor of two for its geometric
sequence, meaning that each next pack must contain at least twice as
many objects as the next-smaller one. In some cases it may be helpful to
configure this factor though to reduce the number of packfile merges
even further, e.g. in very big repositories. But while git-repack(1)
itself supports doing this, the maintenance task does not give us a way
to tune it.
Introduce a new "maintenance.geometric-repack.splitFactor" configuration
to plug this gap.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Introduce a new "geometric-repack" task. This task uses our geometric
repack infrastructure as provided by git-repack(1) itself, which is a
strategy that especially hosting providers tend to use to amortize the
costs of repacking objects.
There is one issue though with geometric repacks, namely that they
unconditionally pack all loose objects, regardless of whether or not
they are reachable. This is done because it means that we can completely
skip the reachability step, which significantly speeds up the operation.
But it has the big downside that we are unable to expire objects over
time.
To address this issue we thus use a split strategy in this new task:
whenever a geometric repack would merge together all packs, we instead
do an all-into-one repack. By default, these all-into-one repacks have
cruft packs enabled, so unreachable objects would now be written into
their own pack. Consequently, they won't be soaked up during geometric
repacking anymore and can be expired with the next full repack, assuming
that their expiry date has surpassed.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
While git-gc(1) knows to garbage collect the rerere cache,
git-maintenance(1) does not yet have a task for this cleanup. Introduce
a new "rerere-gc" task to plug this gap.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
While git-gc(1) knows to prune stale worktrees, git-maintenance(1) does
not yet have a task for this cleanup. Introduce a new "worktree-prune"
task to plug this gap.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
By default, git-maintenance(1) uses the "gc" task to ensure that the
repository is well-maintained. This can be changed, for example by
either explicitly configuring which tasks should be enabled or by using
the "incremental" maintenance strategy. If so, git-maintenance(1) does
not know to expire reflog entries, which is a subtask that git-gc(1)
knows to perform for the user. Consequently, the reflog will grow
indefinitely unless the user manually trims it.
Introduce a new "reflog-expire" task that plugs this gap:
- When running the task directly, then we simply execute `git reflog
expire --all`, which is the same as git-gc(1).
- When running git-maintenance(1) with the `--auto` flag, then we only
run the task in case the "HEAD" reflog has at least N reflog entries
that would be discarded. By default, N is set to 100, but this can
be configured via "maintenance.reflog-expire.auto". When a negative
integer has been provided we always expire entries, zero causes us
to never expire entries, and a positive value specifies how many
entries need to exist before we consider pruning the entries.
Note that the condition for the `--auto` flags is merely a heuristic and
optimized for being fast. This is because `git maintenance run --auto`
will be executed quite regularly, so scanning through all reflogs would
likely be too expensive in many repositories.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The 'loose-objects' task of 'git maintenance run' first deletes loose
objects that exit within packfiles and then collects loose objects into
a packfile. This second step uses an implicit limit of fifty thousand
that cannot be modified by users.
Add a new config option that allows this limit to be adjusted or ignored
entirely.
While creating tests for this option, I noticed that actually there was
an off-by-one error due to the strict comparison in the limit check. I
considered making the limit check turn true on equality, but instead I
thought to use INT_MAX as a "no limit" barrier which should mean it's
never possible to hit the limit. Thus, a new decrement to the limit is
provided if the value is positive. (The restriction to positive values
is to avoid underflow if INT_MIN is configured.)
Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We presently use the ".txt" extension for our AsciiDoc files. While not
wrong, most editors do not associate this extension with AsciiDoc,
meaning that contributors don't get automatic editor functionality that
could be useful, such as syntax highlighting and prose linting.
It is much more common to use the ".adoc" extension for AsciiDoc files,
since this helps editors automatically detect files and also allows
various forges to provide rich (HTML-like) rendering. Let's do that
here, renaming all of the files and updating the includes where
relevant. Adjust the various build scripts and makefiles to use the new
extension as well.
Note that this should not result in any user-visible changes to the
documentation.
Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
