The sound distributed version control system

#498 Overview of performance on large repos

Closed on December 7, 2021
ganwell on July 28, 2021

I tested with the linux-kernal again and I wanted to share my timing tests.

$> git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux

$> cd linux

$> rm -rf .git

$> time pijul init

real    0m0.029s
user    0m0.006s
sys     0m0.003s

$> time pijul add -r .

real    0m0.661s
user    0m0.880s
sys     0m0.925s

$> time pijul record -a -m "initial"
Hash: GESK4N3ECYNCE577B4XV4MGR3G7ZJ7374PQIQNXMCCVGSSYFGVVQC

real    41m19.719s
user    41m12.613s
sys     0m2.881s

$> echo a > a

$> pijul add a

$> time pijul record -a -m "a"
Hash: PYOJG37BXBAB3FXBBGIYCIEPAALORVHGNUUPNEVEIQVTIGPLDFUAC

real    0m2.985s
user    0m2.332s
sys     0m0.630s

$> time pijul fork new

real    0m0.032s
user    0m0.005s
sys     0m0.006s

$> time pijul channel switch new
Outputting repository ↙
^C
real    305m25.836s
user    315m27.765s
sys     124m6.178s

I gave up on switching a channel, I did it last night and it finished in the morning, so it definitely finishes. Switching channels is in general a slow operation, also in my very small projects.

System

$> uname -a
Linux host 5.10.52-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Jul 20 20:32:02 UTC 2021 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$> pijul --version
pijul 1.0.0-alpha.52

$> cargo --version
cargo 1.51.0 (43b129a20 2021-03-16)

$> cat /proc/cpuinfo  | grep "model name" | head -n1
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6770HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz
pmeunier on July 28, 2021

This is rather surprising, are you sure you compiled with --release? @tankf33der tests Pijul on the Linux kernel regularly, it’s much much much faster than that (like 100-1000 times at least).

There was one regression lately in the ZStd library, where compressing patches would take thousands of time more time than before, but I doubt that’s enough to explain your results.

ganwell on July 28, 2021

Yes, I did these tests before and it was much faster, something must have broken. That was like 3-4 month ago.

It seems I built release:

pijul v1.0.0-alpha.52
Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 3m 17s

cargo install pijul --version "~1.0.0-alpha"

But, I now tried from the repository:

The latest change:

Change OQWST3TEEDXBU44SFXPV2SBWYLNMQDIXWYAGHUBHNUB6LGYJENNQC
Author: FZQ2g7VfnzLYM4mtTVDk9HAZjA8Jk9ndkwN1icgbtWUr
Date: 2021-07-28 08:20:11.733136979 UTC

    Fixing errors in pijul-git

cd pijul
cargo build --release

   Compiling pijul v1.0.0-alpha.52 (/home/ganwell/git/pijul/pijul)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 3m 07s

Is that correct?

The new results:

$> time /home/ganwell/git/pijul/target/release/pijul record  -a -m "init"
Hash: 7MEAMB2ZLLKUO6KJ5F55X6RWWAMYLMMNPML7DCN7FRNT25ETZVEQC

real    42m1.438s
user    41m54.659s
sys     0m2.751s

$> time /home/ganwell/git/pijul/target/release/pijul fork new

real    0m0.026s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.004s

$> time /home/ganwell/git/pijul/target/release/pijul channel switch new
Outputting repository ↑

real    315m35.897s
user    328m8.412s
sys     130m54.262s
tankf33der on July 29, 2021

This is my performance analysis pijul vs. linux (latest, version 5.14, 1M commits, 72.8k files, 4.8k dirs).

Long story short: pijul is OK in this scenario.

My environment - cheap, 5y old, HP laptop - “Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz” with SSD.

$ git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux
$ cd linux
$ rm -rf .git
$ time pijul init

real	0m0,020s
user	0m0,004s
sys	0m0,012s
$ time pijul add -r .

real	0m1,128s
user	0m2,021s
sys	0m1,719s
$ pijul ls | wc -l
77646
$ time pijul record -am"."
Hash: P3XIHBZAULWGSEHAYYQPRJ7WIEXFPGJGT2V24HUFBNS3TZ6PMH7AC

real	1m18,132s
user	1m14,686s
sys	0m3,139s
$

Lets stop here.

@ganwell, check my timings, you initial record was 42min.

What is your local zstd library version?

tankf33der on July 29, 2021

For anybody who care about performance - darcs can not initially record linux 2.0 sources out of the box.

ganwell on July 29, 2021

@tankf33der I use the version from the OS

$> ldd /home/ganwell/.cargo/bin/pijul
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fffd3b42000)
        libzstd.so.1 => /usr/lib/libzstd.so.1 (0x00007f04fad33000)

$> pamac list | grep zstd
lib32-zstd                                1.5.0-2                     multilib   1.1 MB
zstd                                      1.5.0-1                     core       3.8 MB

What version do I need? Or is it vendored somewhere somehow?

tankf33der on July 29, 2021

1.5.0 have the performance degradation, try to downgrade to 1.4.9 you will get performance boost.

ganwell on July 29, 2021

@tankf33der

Now pijul is fast again. Thanks alot!

$> time pijul record -a -m "init"
Hash: OTFSNWOHD4UWAZLG3JNOYEMH4QJNBZHGZELK6SXWCUR5U3ZYW6CAC

real    0m54.084s
user    0m51.786s
sys     0m1.790s
pmeunier on July 29, 2021

By the way, there are probably things we could do to make it faster. @ganwell, if you’re interested, feel free to add timers to the functions in libpijul::record and see what is fast and what isn’t.

The other part of recording a patch is applying it, but I don’t really think we can gain much in that area, although timing libpijul::apply::apply wouldn’t do any harm.

If it turns out the major part of the time is spent in ZStd, there isn’t much we can do, but I don’t think that’s the case.

I am interested in making Pijul as fast as possible (even though correctness and debugging is my top priority ATM).

tankf33der on July 29, 2021

tankf33der/peace-and-war run book getting much slower after ~350 records and import history from pkgsrc getting slower every ~1000 records.

ganwell on July 29, 2021

@pmeunier channel switch is still as slow as before. I started to only use shallow repositories, not importing the history, so no problem for me. Still I tried to profile:

https://user.fm/files/v2-841e66796d91beac79b8ccfb59869eb6/profile.png

Some questions I would ask myself if I knew the code better:

  1. Do the times one function calls the other make sense or is the rate too high?
  2. Is find_path called too often?

It seems find_path() is called from Reset::reset, I think this means via a queue.

The project has 1700 files and 1400 changes.

Here is the profile: https://user.fm/files/v2-27e087b672a16aa1844e5340ec54d453/callgrind.out.good.bz2

You can open it with kcachegrind.

EDIT: The project is caluma again. https://github.com/projectcaluma/caluma

ganwell on July 29, 2021

If you want to profile you need to lower the min stack size:

RUST_MIN_STACK=0 valgrind –tool=callgrind /home/ganwell/git/pijul/target/release/pijul channel switch new

Otherwise the program will go into a backtrace loop. valgrind only provides 1mb of stack and rust expects more (not knowing that it is running in the valgrind-vm)

http://www.codeofview.com/fix-rs/2017/01/24/how-to-optimize-rust-programs-on-linux/

ganwell on July 29, 2021

The above makes it sound like I profiled the complete channel switch, but I couldn’t after a while rust will use too much stack. So question 2. can’t be answered, sorry.

pmeunier on July 30, 2021

Thanks for that. I don’t know if find_path is called too often. If you don’t use more than one channel, get should return instantly when called from rc.

ganwell on July 30, 2021

I can avoid channel switches with git-pijul now.

pmeunier on December 7, 2021

I believe this discussion is resolved, feel free to reopen if not.

(I’m trying to close as many discussion as possible in order to move to beta).

pmeunier closed this discussion on December 7, 2021