On Tuesday, May 22, 2012 12:21:57 pm Jeff King wrote: > On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 11:51:16PM -0600, Martin Fick wrote: > AFAIK, ref advertisement scales linearly. Which is > probably not acceptable over a slow link, and we could > do better. Right, although it is not just a slow link issue. Linear or not, this problem does not scale, it needs to be based on N, the number of refs which need updating, not N the number of refs in the repo. I gave the following numbers to Junio and Shawn recently and I figure it is probably worth mentioning them here to perhaps give others some insights into just how bad this problem can be... Android consists of approximately 400 projects, and if anyone tags their builds regularly, that means that they will be tagging 400 projects per build. We have something like 10K tags on average across 400 projects, so when we do a simple No Op sync just to see if all 400 projects are up to date, this yields about 200MB of data over the wire (4M refs)!!! That 200MB is using a -j4 on repo sync and it chews up about 1.5 cores on a high end server to serve that 200MB for over 1min. Now imagine a build bot needing to build about 25 images in parallel all just doing a No Op sync to see if they are up to date! That's 25 * 200MB = 5GB data and 25 * 1.5 cores ~= 36 cores. That means our high end 24 core server falls over all for a No Op. As you can imagine, we really would like to see this eliminated from our workflows. If we want to check 400 projects to see if they are up to date, it should be 400 refs, not 400 * 10K, -Martin -- Employee of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. which is a member of Code Aurora Forum -- 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