From ca5381d43e8595f592d8d7ecfc9bb0bfa5e52f6d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:55:51 -0800
Subject: pack-objects: finishing touches.

This introduces --no-reuse-delta option to disable reusing of
existing delta, which is a large part of the optimization
introduced by this series.  This may become necessary if
repeated repacking makes delta chain too long.  With this, the
output of the command becomes identical to that of the older
implementation.  But the performance suffers greatly.

It still allows reusing non-deltified representations; there is
no point uncompressing and recompressing the whole text.

It also adds a couple more statistics output, while squelching
it under -q flag, which the last round forgot to do.

  $ time old-git-pack-objects --stdout >/dev/null <RL
  Generating pack...
  Done counting 184141 objects.
  Packing 184141 objects....................
  real    12m8.530s       user    11m1.450s       sys     0m57.920s
  $ time git-pack-objects --stdout >/dev/null <RL
  Generating pack...
  Done counting 184141 objects.
  Packing 184141 objects.....................
  Total 184141, written 184141 (delta 138297), reused 178833 (delta 134081)
  real    0m59.549s       user    0m56.670s       sys     0m2.400s
  $ time git-pack-objects --stdout --no-reuse-delta >/dev/null <RL
  Generating pack...
  Done counting 184141 objects.
  Packing 184141 objects.....................
  Total 184141, written 184141 (delta 134833), reused 47904 (delta 0)
  real    11m13.830s      user    9m45.240s       sys     0m44.330s

There is one remaining issue when --no-reuse-delta option is not
used.  It can create delta chains that are deeper than specified.

    A<--B<--C<--D   E   F   G

Suppose we have a delta chain A to D (A is stored in full either
in a pack or as a loose object. B is depth1 delta relative to A,
C is depth2 delta relative to B...) with loose objects E, F, G.
And we are going to pack all of them.

B, C and D are left as delta against A, B and C respectively.
So A, E, F, and G are examined for deltification, and let's say
we decided to keep E expanded, and store the rest as deltas like
this:

    E<--F<--G<--A

Oops.  We ended up making D a bit too deep, didn't we?  B, C and
D form a chain on top of A!

This is because we did not know what the final depth of A would
be, when we checked objects and decided to keep the existing
delta.  Unfortunately, deferring the decision until just before
the deltification is not an option.  To be able to make B, C,
and D candidates for deltification with the rest, we need to
know the type and final unexpanded size of them, but the major
part of the optimization comes from the fact that we do not read
the delta data to do so -- getting the final size is quite an
expensive operation.

To prevent this from happening, we should keep A from being
deltified.  But how would we tell that, cheaply?

To do this most precisely, after check_object() runs, each
object that is used as the base object of some existing delta
needs to be marked with the maximum depth of the objects we
decided to keep deltified (in this case, D is depth 3 relative
to A, so if no other delta chain that is longer than 3 based on
A exists, mark A with 3).  Then when attempting to deltify A, we
would take that number into account to see if the final delta
chain that leads to D becomes too deep.

However, this is a bit cumbersome to compute, so we would cheat
and reduce the maximum depth for A arbitrarily to depth/4 in
this implementation.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
---
 Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt | 21 ++++++++++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

(limited to 'Documentation')

diff --git a/Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt b/Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt
index 2d67d3911..4cb2e83fa 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt
@@ -8,7 +8,10 @@ git-pack-objects - Create a packed archive of objects.
 
 SYNOPSIS
 --------
-'git-pack-objects' [--non-empty] [--local] [--incremental] [--window=N] [--depth=N] {--stdout | base-name} < object-list
+[verse]
+'git-pack-objects' [-q] [--no-reuse-delta] [--non-empty]
+	[--local] [--incremental] [--window=N] [--depth=N]
+	{--stdout | base-name} < object-list
 
 
 DESCRIPTION
@@ -32,6 +35,10 @@ Placing both in the pack/ subdirectory of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY (or
 any of the directories on $GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES)
 enables git to read from such an archive.
 
+In a packed archive, an object is either stored as a compressed
+whole, or as a difference from some other object.  The latter is
+often called a delta.
+
 
 OPTIONS
 -------
@@ -74,6 +81,18 @@ base-name::
         Only create a packed archive if it would contain at
         least one object.
 
+-q::
+	This flag makes the command not to report its progress
+	on the standard error stream.
+
+--no-reuse-delta::
+	When creating a packed archive in a repository that
+	has existing packs, the command reuses existing deltas.
+	This sometimes results in a slightly suboptimal pack.
+	This flag tells the command not to reuse existing deltas
+	but compute them from scratch.
+
+
 Author
 ------
 Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
-- 
cgit v1.2.1