Re: [GSoC][RFC] Proposal: Make pack access code thread-safe

[Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 8:23 AM Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 5:52 AM Christian Couder
> <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Git has a very optimized mechanism to compactly store
> > > objects (blobs, trees, commits, etc.) in packfiles[2]. These files are
> > > created by[3]:
> > >
> > > 1. listing objects;
> > > 2. sorting the list with some good heuristics;
> > > 3. traversing the list with a sliding window to find similar objects in
> > > the window, in order to do delta decomposing;
> > > 4. compress the objects with zlib and write them to the packfile.
> > >
> > > What we are calling pack access code in this document, is the set of
> > > functions responsible for retrieving the objects stored at the
> > > packfiles. This process consists, roughly speaking, in three parts:
> > >
> > > 1. Locate and read the blob from packfile, using the index file;
> > > 2. If the blob is a delta, locate and read the base object to apply the
> > > delta on top of it;
> > > 3. Once the full content is read, decompress it (using zlib inflate).
> > >
> > > Note: There is a delta cache for the second step so that if another
> > > delta depends on the same base object, it is already in memory. This
> > > cache is global; also, the sliding windows, are global per packfile.
> >
> > Yeah, but the sliding windows are used only when creating pack files,
> > not when reading them, right?
>
> These windows are actually for reading. We used to just mmap the whole
> pack file in the early days but that was impossible for 4+ GB packs on
> 32-bit platforms, which was one of the reasons, I think, that sliding
> windows were added, to map just the parts we want to read.

To clarify (I think I see why you mentioned pack creation now), there
are actually two window concepts. core.packedGitWindowSize is about
reading pack files. pack.window is for generating pack files. The
second window should already be thread-safe since we do all the
heuristics to find best base object candidates in threads.
-- 
Duy