On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Ben Peart <peartben@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Goal > ~~~~ > > To be able to better handle repos with many files that any individual > developer doesn’t need it would be nice if clone/fetch only brought down > those files that were actually needed. > > To enable that, we are proposing adding a flag to clone/fetch that will > instruct the server to limit the objects it sends to commits and trees > and to not send any blobs. > > When git performs an operation that requires a blob that isn’t currently > available locally, it will download the missing blob and add it to the > local object store. Interesting. This is also an area I want to work on with my team at $DAY_JOB. Repositories are growing along multiple dimensions, and developers or editors don't always need all blobs for all time available locally to successfully perform their work. > Design > ~~~~~~ > > Clone and fetch will pass a “--lazy-clone” flag (open to a better name > here) similar to “--depth” that instructs the server to only return > commits and trees and to ignore blobs. My group at $DAY_JOB hasn't talked about it yet, but I want to add a protocol capability that lets clone/fetch ask only for blobs smaller than a specified byte count. This could be set to a reasonable text file size (e.g. <= 5 MiB) to predominately download only source files and text documentation, omitting larger binaries. If the limit was set to 0, its the same as your idea to ignore all blobs. > Later during git operations like checkout, when a blob cannot be found > after checking all the regular places (loose, pack, alternates, etc), > git will download the missing object and place it into the local object > store (currently as a loose object) then resume the operation. Right. I'd like to have this object retrieval be inside the native Git wire protocol, reusing the remote configuration and authentication setup. That requires expanding the server side of the protocol implementation slightly allowing any reachable object to be retrieved by SHA-1 alone. Bitmap indexes can significantly reduce the computational complexity for the server. > To prevent git from accidentally downloading all missing blobs, some git > operations are updated to be aware of the potential for missing blobs. > The most obvious being check_connected which will return success as if > everything in the requested commits is available locally. This ... sounds risky for the developer, as the repository may be corrupt due to a missing object, and the user cannot determine it. Would it be reasonable for the server to return a list of SHA-1s it knows should exist, but has omitted due to the blob threshold (above), and the local repository store this in a binary searchable file? During connectivity checking its assumed OK if an object is not present in the object store, but is listed in this omitted objects file. > To minimize the impact on the server, the existing dumb HTTP protocol > endpoint “objects/<sha>” can be used to retrieve the individual missing > blobs when needed. I'd prefer this to be in the native wire protocol, where the objects are in pack format (which unfortunately differs from loose format). I assume servers would combine many objects into pack files, potentially isolating large uncompressable binaries into their own packs, stored separately from commits/trees/small-text-blobs. I get the value of this being in HTTP, where HTTP caching inside proxies can be leveraged to reduce master server load. I wonder if the native wire protocol could be taught to use a variation of an HTTP GET that includes the object SHA-1 in the URL line, to retrieve a one-object pack file. > Performance considerations > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > We found that downloading commits and trees on demand had a significant > negative performance impact. In addition, many git commands assume all > commits and trees are available locally so they quickly got pulled down > anyway. Even in very large repos the commits and trees are relatively > small so bringing them down with the initial commit and subsequent fetch > commands was reasonable. > > After cloning, the developer can use sparse-checkout to limit the set of > files to the subset they need (typically only 1-10% in these large > repos). This allows the initial checkout to only download the set of > files actually needed to complete their task. At any point, the > sparse-checkout file can be updated to include additional files which > will be fetched transparently on demand. > > Typical source files are relatively small so the overhead of connecting > and authenticating to the server for a single file at a time is > substantial. As a result, having a long running process that is started > with the first request and can cache connection information between > requests is a significant performance win. Junio and I talked years ago (offline, sorry no mailing list archive) about "narrow checkout", which is the idea of the client being able to ask for a pack file from the server that only includes objects along specific path names. This would allow a client to amortize the setup costs, and even delta compress source files against each other (e.g. boilerplate across Makefiles or license headers). If the paths of interest can be determined as a batch before starting the connection, this may be easier than maintaining a cross platform connection cache in a separate process. > Now some numbers > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > One repo has 3+ million files at tip across 500K folders with 5-6K > active developers. They have done a lot of work to remove large files > from the repo so it is down to < 100GB. > > Before changes: clone took hours to transfer the 87GB .pack + 119MB .idx > > After changes: clone took 4 minutes to transfer 305MB .pack + 37MB .idx > > After hydrating 35K files (the typical number any individual developer > needs to do their work), there was an additional 460 MB of loose files > downloaded. > > Total savings: 86.24 GB * 6000 developers = 517 Terabytes saved! > > We have another repo (3.1 M files, 618 GB at tip with no history with > 3K+ active developers) where the savings are even greater. This is quite impressive, and shows this strategy has a lot of promise. > Future Work > ~~~~~~~~~~~ > > The current prototype calls a new hook proc in sha1_object_info_extended > and read_object, to download each missing blob. A better solution would > be to implement this via a long running process that is spawned on the > first download and listens for requests to download additional objects > until it terminates when the parent git operation exits (similar to the > recent long running smudge and clean filter work). Or batching these up in advance. checkout should be able to determine which path entries from the index it wants to write to the working tree. Once it has that set of paths it wants to write, it should be fast to construct a subset of paths for which the blobs are not present locally, and then pass the entire group off for download. > Need to do more investigation into possible code paths that can trigger > unnecessary blobs to be downloaded. For example, we have determined > that the rename detection logic in status can also trigger unnecessary > blobs to be downloaded making status slow. There isn't much of a workaround here. Only options I can see are disabling rename detection when objects are above a certain size, or removing entries from the rename table when the blob isn't already local, which may yield different results than if the blob(s) were local. Another is to try to have actual source files always be local, and thus we only punt on rename detection for bigger files that are more likely to be binary, and thus less likely to match for rename[1] unless it was SHA-1 identity match, which can be done without the blob(s) present. [1] I assume most really big files are some sort of media asset (e.g. JPEG), where a change inside the source data may result in large difference in bytes due to the compression applied by the media file format. > Need to investigate an alternate batching scheme where we can make a > single request for a set of "related" blobs and receive single a > packfile (especially during checkout). Heh, what I just said above. Glad to see you already thought of it. > Need to investigate adding a new endpoint in the smart protocol that can > download both individual blobs as well as a batch of blobs. Agreed, I said as much above. Again, glad to see you have similar ideas. :)