Re: git reset and ctime

[ghazel@gmail.com]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> ghazel@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> I've encountered a strange issue where "git reset --hard" insists on
>> "Checking out files ..." when all that is changed is the ctime
>
> There is a performance trade-off.  Refreshing the index requires
> reading+hashing the existing file if the stat information changed;
> this could be faster or slower than blindly overwriting depending on
> the situation.
>
> That said, I have no strong objection to an implicit refresh in "git
> reset" (performance-sensitive scripts should be using read-tree
> directly anyway).  Have you tried making that change to
> builtin/reset.c?  How does it perform in practice?

I did not make the modifications to reset.c, I just ran the refresh
before reset:

So originally:

$ time git reset --hard <rev>
Checking out files: 100% (2772/2772), done.

real    0m5.328s
user    0m2.539s
sys     0m2.542s

as opposed to:

$ time git update-index --refresh

real    0m1.236s
user    0m1.024s
sys     0m0.201s

$ time git reset --hard <rev>

real    0m0.055s
user    0m0.011s
sys     0m0.041s

>>              My deploy process (capistrano) maintains a cached copy of
>> a git repo, which it fetches, resets, and then hardlinks files from
>> when a deploy occurs ( https://github.com/37signals/fast_remote_cache
>> ). The hardlinking step is meant to save the time of copying the file.
>> but hardlinking changes the ctime of the source files.
>
> Interesting.  Setting "[core] trustctime = false" in the repository
> configuration could be a good solution (no performance downside I can
> think of).

This is a very useful suggestion. I do not see a case where ctime
would be valuable to me. Is it really valuable to other people? What
is the trade-off?

-Greg