Re: [PATCH 0/3] Lazy-load trees when reading commit-graph

[Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>]

On 4/3/2018 4:20 PM, Jeff King wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 03, 2018 at 09:14:50AM -0400, Derrick Stolee wrote:
>
>>> I'm not sure what the exact solution would be, but I imagine something
>>> like variable-sized "struct commit"s with the parent pointers embedded,
>>> with some kind of flag to indicate the number of parents (and probably
>>> some fallback to break out to a linked list for extreme cases of more
>>> than 2 parents).  It may end up pretty invasive, though, as there's a
>>> lot of open-coded traversals of that parent list.
>>>
>>> Anyway, not anything to do with this patch, but food for thought as you
>>> micro-optimize these traversals.
>> One other thing that I've been thinking about is that 'struct commit' is so
>> much bigger than the other structs in 'union any_object'. This means that
>> the object cache, which I think creates blocks of 'union any_object' for
>> memory-alignment reasons, is overly bloated. This would be especially true
>> when walking many more trees than commits.
>>
>> Perhaps there are other memory concerns in that case (such as cached
>> buffers) that the 'union any_object' is not a concern, but it is worth
>> thinking about as we brainstorm how to reduce the parent-list memory.
> It definitely bloats any_object, but I don't think we typically allocate
> too many of those. Those should only come from lookup_unknown_object(),
> but typically we'll come across objects by traversing the graph, in
> which case we have an expectation of the type (and use the appropriate
> lookup_foo() function, which uses the type-specific block allocators).

Thanks for the clarification here. I'm glad I was wrong about how often 
any_object is used.

Thanks,
-Stolee