Re: [PATCH v3] index-pack: retain child bases in delta cache

[Arijit Banerjee <arijit91@gmail.com>]

Apologies, my earlier replies were sent through GitHub's notification
emails and appeared only as PR comments, so they did not reach the mailing
list.

On Thu, Jun 4, 2026, Jeff King wrote:
> So I am happy with either v2 or v3.

I also did not see a meaningful performance difference between v2 and v3.
I am happy with either direction and defer to the maintainers on whether
v3's more precise release is worth the added complexity.

On Wed, Jun 3, 2026, Derrick Stolee wrote:
> Did you see any evidence that this change has the intended effect of
> reducing process memory proactively instead of relying on cache evictions?

I do not have strong RSS evidence. The spot checks showed no meaningful RSS
change, and max RSS is not a good signal here because free_base_data()
lowers Git's internal base_cache_used accounting but may not return pages
to the OS or reduce the recorded peak.

The evidence for v3 is therefore structural: it releases the cached data
once all direct children have been dispatched and retain_data reaches zero,
rather than waiting for cache-pressure eviction.

Thanks,
Arijit