midx: stop repeatedly looking up nonexistent packfiles

The multi-pack index acts as a cache across a set of packfiles so that we can quickly look up which of those packfiles contains a given object. As such, the multi-pack index naturally needs to be updated every time one of the packfiles goes away, or otherwise the multi-pack index has grown stale. A stale multi-pack index should be handled gracefully by Git though, and in fact it is: if the indexed pack cannot be found we simply ignore it and eventually we fall back to doing the object lookup by just iterating through all packs, even if those aren't indexed. But while this fallback works, it has one significant downside: we don't cache the fact that a pack has vanished. This leads to us repeatedly trying to look up the same pack only to realize that it (still) doesn't exist. This issue can be easily demonstrated by creating a repository with a stale multi-pack index and a couple of objects. We do so by creating a repository with two packfiles, both of which are indexed by the multi-pack index, and then repack those two packfiles. Note that we have to move the multi-pack-index before doing the final repack, as Git knows to delete it otherwise. $ git init repo $ cd repo/ $ git config set maintenance.auto false $ for i in $(seq 1000); do printf "%d-original" $i >file-$i; done $ git add . $ git commit -moriginal $ git repack -dl $ for i in $(seq 1000); do printf "%d-modified" $i >file-$i; done $ git commit -a -mmodified $ git repack -dl $ git multi-pack-index write $ mv .git/objects/pack/multi-pack-index . $ git repack -Adl $ mv multi-pack-index .git/objects/pack/ Commands that cause a lot of objects lookups will now repeatedly invoke `add_packed_git()`, which leads to three failed access(3p) calls as well as one failed stat(3p) call. The following strace for example is done for `git log --patch` in the above repository: % time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 74.67 0.024693 1 18038 18031 access 25.33 0.008378 1 6045 6017 newfstatat ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 100.00 0.033071 1 24083 24048 total Fix the issue by introducing a negative lookup cache for indexed packs. This cache works by simply storing an invalid pointer for a missing pack when `prepare_midx_pack()` fails to look up the pack. Most users of the `packs` array don't need to be adjusted, either, as they all know to call `prepare_midx_pack()` before accessing the array. With this change in place we can now see a significantly reduced number of syscalls: % time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 73.58 0.000323 5 60 28 newfstatat 26.42 0.000116 5 23 16 access ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 100.00 0.000439 5 83 44 total Furthermore, this change also results in a speedup: Benchmark 1: git log --patch (revision = HEAD~) Time (mean ± σ): 50.4 ms ± 2.5 ms [User: 22.0 ms, System: 24.4 ms] Range (min … max): 45.4 ms … 54.9 ms 53 runs Benchmark 2: git log --patch (revision = HEAD) Time (mean ± σ): 12.7 ms ± 0.4 ms [User: 11.1 ms, System: 1.6 ms] Range (min … max): 12.4 ms … 15.0 ms 191 runs Summary git log --patch (revision = HEAD) ran 3.96 ± 0.22 times faster than git log --patch (revision = HEAD~) In the end, it should in theory never be necessary to have this negative lookup cache given that we know to update the multi-pack index together with repacks. But as the change is quite contained and as the speedup can be significant as demonstrated above, it does feel sensible to have the negative lookup cache regardless. Based-on-patch-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Patrick Steinhardt committed May 28, 2025 at 14:24 UTC 1f34bf3e082741e053d25b76a0ffe31d9d967594
1 file changed +10 -2
midx.c
+10 -2
@@ -13,6 +13,8 @@
13 #include "pack-bitmap.h"
14 #include "pack-revindex.h"
15
16 +#define MIDX_PACK_ERROR ((void *)(intptr_t)-1)
17 +
18 int midx_checksum_valid(struct multi_pack_index *m);
19 void clear_midx_files_ext(const char *object_dir, const char *ext,
20 const char *keep_hash);
@@ -405,7 +407,7 @@ void close_midx(struct multi_pack_index *m)
407 munmap((unsigned char *)m->data, m->data_len);
408
409 for (i = 0; i < m->num_packs; i++) {
408 - if (m->packs[i])
410 + if (m->packs[i] && m->packs[i] != MIDX_PACK_ERROR)
411 m->packs[i]->multi_pack_index = 0;
412 }
413 FREE_AND_NULL(m->packs);
@@ -458,6 +460,8 @@ int prepare_midx_pack(struct repository *r, struct multi_pack_index *m,
460
461 pack_int_id = midx_for_pack(&m, pack_int_id);
462
463 + if (m->packs[pack_int_id] == MIDX_PACK_ERROR)
464 + return 1;
465 if (m->packs[pack_int_id])
466 return 0;
467
@@ -482,8 +486,10 @@ int prepare_midx_pack(struct repository *r, struct multi_pack_index *m,
486 strbuf_release(&pack_name);
487 strbuf_release(&key);
488
485 - if (!p)
489 + if (!p) {
490 + m->packs[pack_int_id] = MIDX_PACK_ERROR;
491 return 1;
492 + }
493
494 p->multi_pack_index = 1;
495 m->packs[pack_int_id] = p;
@@ -495,6 +501,8 @@ struct packed_git *nth_midxed_pack(struct multi_pack_index *m,
501 uint32_t pack_int_id)
502 {
503 uint32_t local_pack_int_id = midx_for_pack(&m, pack_int_id);
504 + if (m->packs[local_pack_int_id] == MIDX_PACK_ERROR)
505 + return NULL;
506 return m->packs[local_pack_int_id];
507 }
508