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git-care

Health care for your git repository

What is this

git-care.sh is a bash script that handle optimizations and prefetch objects for your busy git repository. The optimizations are borrowed from Microsoft's Scalar with a few tweaks.

The script is designed in a modular way where user can easily tune each of the optimzation job via editing .git/config file under git-care section.

The default interval which we run these jobs is 60 seconds which is what I use on a BIG repository (bigger than https://github.com/torvalds/linux). If you are using a smaller repository, do consider to use a bigger sleep interval (i.e. 3600s = 60 minutes)

Requirements

  • Git >2.27.0

  • Bash

Features

  • Pre-Fetch objects: Pre-fetching objects from upstream to hidden refs to pre-populate your git's Object Database(odb) with upstream objects in the background. This will accelerate your git fetch and git pull.

  • Commit-graph refresh: Rebuilding commit-graph split in the background in an incremental fashion with Bloom filter included. Helps accelerate operations require traverse git commit tree (i.e. git log)

  • Loose-objects packing: Fetches and commits are immediately stored as delta compressed packfiles, more optimized for retrieving data as well as storage. Loose-objects are cleaned away after have been packed in a non-disruptive way.

  • Repacking multiple packfiles: Too many packfiles could lead to slow git operations when finding an objects. We incrementally repack multiple packfiles into a bigger one in the background and then remove the old packfiles. This reduce the number of packfile in a repository thus making git a lot faster.

  • Refresh untracked cache: Git status relies on untracked cache to keep user up-to-date on the repository status. Keeping this fresh should make git status faster and more accurate

  • Fsmonitor Watchman hook: If you have watchman installed, git-care will detect and install the fsmonitor hook that Microsoft folks has contributed upstream. This will help git status work a lot faster in bigger repository.

  • Clean up: Similar to git-gc, various garbage collection is also performed routinely (i.e. worktree, reflogs, packrefs, etc...)

Why not MSFT Scalar

  • Scalar does not support Linux-based OS (only MacOS + Window for now).

  • Multi-pack-index repack operations in this script was slightly altered to achieve a more consistent result. This has been ported to upstream Scalar in microsoft/scalar#375 .

  • Included Bloom filter in commit-graph and detection for missing Bloom filter.

What is missing in git-care

  • No support for GVFS

  • No support for sparse-checkout and partial-clone (though this could be used together with a partial-clone repo)

Caveats

Similar to Scalar optimization, there are some caveats to these optimizations approach:

  • You are downloading all branches. Some workflow does not require users to contains all branches on their local copy so it might be a waste to fetch all branches in the background. I intentionally left the ref spec to be a variable that could be updated by user before running so that they can choose which ref to pre-fetch.

  • You are NOT removing un-reachable objects. In wokflows which have users git push --force a lot, many git objects will become loose and unreachable from any branches. In standard approach, these will be cleaned up with git gc, but with git-care.sh and Scalar, these objects are kept delta compressed in pack files. So its a good idea to occasionally run git repack -A -d && git prune manually to remove these loose objects. In truth, these loose objects after delta-compressed are not much compare to the total size of your repo, so it should be perfectly ok to just leave it in.

  • git-care.sh is designed to be a toggling scripts, which leverages git config to be control flags. This means that when you turn off git-care.sh, only the flags are removed and not the processes. The processes will turn themselves off within a minute interval, after they detect that relevant config has been removed. But this also means that you should NOT turn off -> turn on git-care.sh too quickly. I hope I could improve this limitation in the future when I refactor this into a different language.

  • Repack limit: Scalar has a cap to packing loose objects and repacking multiple packs. This due to the nature of working with the Microsoft Office repository to be way too big and slow. With git-care.sh, I dont ignore the biggest packfile when repacking as well as put no loose objects count cap when packing loose objects, but one should be able to add such if else condition in easily if needed (it's bash script).

  • Multiple projects support: git-care.sh spawns multiple processes to support 1 big repo project. Attempt to run this over multiple project will cause an unhealthy amount of processes running in parallel in your machine. A proper task scheduler should be used to manage multiple-projects.

What next?

This script is pretty much feature completed and tested on MacOS + Centos 7.

I orignally wrote this, based on Scalar optimzation, to support similar optimizations on Linux environments. Bash script provides a quick and easy iteration approach to achieving an Minimum Viable Product. However in order to allow further features improvemnts with user configurations, I might consider re-writting this in Rust / Golang.

  • Rewrite in Golang/Rust (multi-platform languages)
  • User config prefetch RefSpec (choose which refs/branch/tag to prefetch)
  • User config for read-only mirror
  • PostCommit hook to prepush (this should go with a serverside script that handle cleanup on prepush refs) pre-push + pre-fetch together achieve similar effect like Facebook's Eden Commit Cloud.
  • Documentation / Testing

Ackownledgements

  • Most of the works here were inspired by Derrick Stolee's works in upstream git and MSFT's Scalar

  • This script was wrote to improve the Developer Experience @ ${DAY_JOB}. An internal version of git-care.sh is mainained separately with little modifications.