sha1_file: fast-path null sha1 as a missing object

In theory nobody should ever ask the low-level object code
for a null sha1. It's used as a sentinel for "no such
object" in lots of places, so leaking through to this level
is a sign that the higher-level code is not being careful
about its error-checking.  In practice, though, quite a few
code paths seem to rely on the null sha1 lookup failing as a
way to quietly propagate non-existence (e.g., by feeding it
to lookup_commit_reference_gently(), which then returns
NULL).

When this happens, we do two inefficient things:

  1. We actually search for the null sha1 in packs and in
     the loose object directory.

  2. When we fail to find it, we re-scan the pack directory
     in case a simultaneous repack happened to move it from
     loose to packed. This can be very expensive if you have
     a large number of packs.

Only the second one actually causes noticeable performance
problems, so we could treat them independently. But for the
sake of simplicity (both of code and of reasoning about it),
it makes sense to just declare that the null sha1 cannot be
a real on-disk object, and looking it up will always return
"no such object".

There's no real loss of functionality to do so Its use as a
sentinel value means that anybody who is unlucky enough to
hit the 2^-160th chance of generating an object with that
sha1 is already going to find the object largely unusable.

In an ideal world, we'd simply fix all of the callers to
notice the null sha1 and avoid passing it to us. But a
simple experiment to catch this with a BUG() shows that
there are a large number of code paths that do so.

So in the meantime, let's fix the performance problem by
taking a fast exit from the object lookup when we see a null
sha1. p5551 shows off the improvement (when a fetched ref is
new, the "old" sha1 is 0{40}, which ends up being passed for
fast-forward checks, the status table abbreviations, etc):

  Test            HEAD^             HEAD
  --------------------------------------------------------
  5551.4: fetch   5.51(5.03+0.48)   0.17(0.10+0.06) -96.9%

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/sha1_file.c b/sha1_file.c
index bd5f82e66..fbb73f557 100644
--- a/sha1_file.c
+++ b/sha1_file.c
@@ -2971,6 +2971,9 @@ int sha1_object_info_extended(const unsigned char *sha1, struct object_info *oi,
 				    lookup_replace_object(sha1) :
 				    sha1;
 
+	if (is_null_sha1(real))
+		return -1;
+
 	if (!oi)
 		oi = &blank_oi;