Fully activate the sliding window pack access.

This finally turns on the sliding window behavior for packfile data
access by mapping limited size windows and chaining them under the
packed_git->windows list.

We consider a given byte offset to be within the window only if there
would be at least 20 bytes (one hash worth of data) accessible after
the requested offset.  This range selection relates to the contract
that use_pack() makes with its callers, allowing them to access
one hash or one object header without needing to call use_pack()
for every byte of data obtained.

In the worst case scenario we will map the same page of data twice
into memory: once at the end of one window and once again at the
start of the next window.  This duplicate page mapping will happen
only when an object header or a delta base reference is spanned
over the end of a window and is always limited to just one page of
duplication, as no sane operating system will ever have a page size
smaller than a hash.

I am assuming that the possible wasted page of virtual address
space is going to perform faster than the alternatives, which
would be to copy the object header or ref delta into a temporary
buffer prior to parsing, or to check the window range on every byte
during header parsing.  We may decide to revisit this decision in
the future since this is just a gut instinct decision and has not
actually been proven out by experimental testing.

Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/config.txt b/Documentation/config.txt
index 28fe6942c..d71653dc6 100644
--- a/Documentation/config.txt
+++ b/Documentation/config.txt
@@ -118,6 +118,17 @@ core.legacyheaders::
 	database directly (where the "http://" and "rsync://" protocols
 	count as direct access).
 
+core.packedGitWindowSize::
+	Number of bytes of a pack file to map into memory in a
+	single mapping operation.  Larger window sizes may allow
+	your system to process a smaller number of large pack files
+	more quickly.  Smaller window sizes will negatively affect
+	performance due to increased calls to the opreating system's
+	memory manager, but may improve performance when accessing
+	a large number of large pack files.  Default is 32 MiB,
+	which should be reasonable for all users/operating systems.
+	You probably do not need to adjust this value.
+
 core.packedGitLimit::
 	Maximum number of bytes to map simultaneously into memory
 	from pack files.  If Git needs to access more than this many