On Fri, 1 May 2009, Jeff King wrote:
On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 02:43:49PM -0400, Linus Torvalds wrote:
Like all generalizations, this is only mostly true. Fast network servers
with big caches can outperform disks for some loads.
[...]
In contrast, a workstation with local filesystems and enough memory to
cache it well will just be a lot nicer.
[...]
I have never used perforce, but I get the impression that it is more
optimized for such a situation.
I doubt it. I suspect git will outperform pretty much anything else in
that kind of situation too.
Thanks for the analysis; what you said makes sense to me. However, there
is at least one case of somebody complaining that git doesn't scale as
well as perforce for their load:
http://gandolf.homelinux.org/blog/index.php?id=50
Part of his issue is with git-p4 sucking, which it probably does. But
part of it sounds like he has a gigantic workload (the description of
which sounds silly to me, but I respect the fact that he is probably
describing standard practice among some companies), and that workload is
just a little too gigantic for the workstations to handle. I.e., by
throwing resources at the central server they can avoid throwing as many
at each workstation.
But there are so few details it's hard to say whether he's doing
something else wrong or suboptimally. He does mention Windows, which
IIRC has horrific stat performance.
the key thing for his problem is the support for large binary objects.
there was discussion here a few weeks ago about ways to handle such things
without trying to pull them into packs. I suspect that solving those sorts
of issues would go a long way towards closing the gap on this workload.
there may be issues in doing a clone for repositories that large, I don't
remember exactly what happens when you have something larger than 4G to
send in a clone.
David Lang
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html