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authorPatrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>2025-10-24 08:57:23 +0200
committerJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2025-10-24 13:42:45 -0700
commitd9bccf2ec3871963098dcd78c61990e27733eb03 (patch)
tree6982d4b547c091a9432bd542031e9ab3a56d592d /commit-graph.h
parent40a74158337f9154d26f82aa7923ca281ae131c2 (diff)
builtin/maintenance: introduce "geometric" strategy
We have two different repacking strategies in Git: - The "gc" strategy uses git-gc(1). - The "incremental" strategy uses multi-pack indices and `git multi-pack-index repack` to merge together smaller packfiles as determined by a specific batch size. The former strategy is our old and trusted default, whereas the latter has historically been used for our scheduled maintenance. But both strategies have their shortcomings: - The "gc" strategy performs regular all-into-one repacks. Furthermore it is rather inflexible, as it is not easily possible for a user to enable or disable specific subtasks. - The "incremental" strategy is not a full replacement for the "gc" strategy as it doesn't know to prune stale data. So today, we don't have a strategy that is well-suited for large repos while being a full replacement for the "gc" strategy. Introduce a new "geometric" strategy that aims to fill this gap. This strategy invokes all the usual cleanup tasks that git-gc(1) does like pruning reflogs and rerere caches as well as stale worktrees. But where it differs from both the "gc" and "incremental" strategy is that it uses our geometric repacking infrastructure exposed by git-repack(1) to repack packfiles. The advantage of geometric repacking is that we only need to perform an all-into-one repack when the object count in a repo has grown significantly. One downside of this strategy is that pruning of unreferenced objects is not going to happen regularly anymore. Every geometric repack knows to soak up all loose objects regardless of their reachability, and merging two or more packs doesn't consider reachability, either. Consequently, the number of unreachable objects will grow over time. This is remedied by doing an all-into-one repack instead of a geometric repack whenever we determine that the geometric repack would end up merging all packfiles anyway. This all-into-one repack then performs our usual reachability checks and writes unreachable objects into a cruft pack. As cruft packs won't ever be merged during geometric repacks we can thus phase out these objects over time. Of course, this still means that we retain unreachable objects for far longer than with the "gc" strategy. But the maintenance strategy is intended especially for large repositories, where the basic assumption is that the set of unreachable objects will be significantly dwarfed by the number of reachable objects. If this assumption is ever proven to be too disadvantageous we could for example introduce a time-based strategy: if the largest packfile has not been touched for longer than $T, we perform an all-into-one repack. But for now, such a mechanism is deferred into the future as it is not clear yet whether it is needed in the first place. Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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