ref-filter: disable save_commit_buffer while traversing
Various ref-filter options like "--contains" or "--merged" may cause us
to traverse large segments of the history graph. It's counter-productive
to have save_commit_buffer turned on, as that will instruct the commit
code to cache in-memory the object contents for each commit we traverse.
This increases the amount of heap memory used while providing little or
no benefit, since we're not actually planning to display those commits
(which is the usual reason that tools like git-log want to keep them
around). We can easily disable this feature while ref-filter is running.
This lowers peak heap (as measured by massif) for running:
git tag --contains
1da177e4c3
in linux.git from ~100MB to ~20MB. It also seems to improve runtime by
4-5% (600ms vs 630ms).
A few points to note:
- it should be safe to temporarily disable save_commit_buffer like
this. The saved buffers are accessed through get_commit_buffer(),
which treats the saved ones like a cache, and loads on-demand from
the object database on a cache miss. So any code that was using this
would not be wrong, it might just incur an extra object lookup for
some objects. But...
- I don't think any ref-filter related code is using the cache. While
it's true that an option like "--format=%(*contents:subject)" or
"--sort=*authordate" will need to look at the commit contents,
ref-filter doesn't use get_commit_buffer() to do so! It always reads
the objects directly via read_object_file(), though it does avoid
re-reading objects if the format can be satisfied without them.
Timing "git tag --format=%(*authordate)" shows that we're the same
before and after, as expected.
- Note that all of this assumes you don't have a commit-graph file. if
you do, then the heap usage is even lower, and the runtime is 10x
faster. So in that sense this is not urgent, as there's a much
better solution. But since it's such an obvious and easy win for
fallback cases (including commits which aren't yet in the graph
file), there's no reason not to.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>