Re: kernel.org mirroring (Re: [GIT PULL] MMC update)

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Sat, 9 Dec 2006, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 
> It is.  At least for kernel.org, the issue isn't that CGI is expensive, its
> that I/O is expensive.

Note that if we had a new gitweb, we could also used the packed refs. 
Those help CPU usage, but they actually help IO patterns more, exactly 
because they avoid all the seeking around in the filesystem.

So with packed refs, there's no need to go from directory lookup to inode 
lookup to data lookup to object lookup for *each* ref - you can do the 
"packed-refs" lookup _once_ (which obviously does the dir->inode->data), 
and you don't need to do the object lookup at all.

Of course, gitweb will then end up doing the object lookup anyway (because 
of getting the dates etc for refs), but if you have packed-refs and a 
reasonably packed repository, that should still really cut down on IO in a 
big way.

So there's probably tons of room for making this more efficient: using a 
newer gitweb, packing refs, using the cgi cache thing.. It sounds like 
what it really needs is just somebody with the competence and time to be 
willing to step up and maintain gitweb on kernel.org...