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authorJunio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>2006-02-16 11:55:51 -0800
committerJunio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>2006-02-17 02:11:38 -0800
commitca5381d43e8595f592d8d7ecfc9bb0bfa5e52f6d (patch)
tree731d44677312891bd27fa10d40c92302bdde85d0 /Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt
parenta49dd05fd047f504a74fb053bb8ddbb9e4bd152b (diff)
downloadgit-ca5381d43e8595f592d8d7ecfc9bb0bfa5e52f6d.tar.gz
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>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt21
1 files changed, 20 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt b/Documentation/git-pack-objects.txt
index 2d67d3911e..4cb2e83faa 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>