packfile: drop release_pack_memory()

Long ago, in 97bfeb34df (Release pack windows before reporting out of
memory., 2006-12-24), we taught xmalloc() and friends to try unmapping
pack windows when malloc() failed. It's unlikely that his helps a lot in
practice, and it has some downsides. First, the downsides:

  1. It makes xmalloc() not thread-safe. We've worked around this in
     pack-objects.c, which installs its own locking version of the
     try_to_free_routine(). But other threaded code doesn't.

  2. It makes the system as a whole harder to reason about. Functions
     which allocate heap memory under the hood may have farther-reaching
     effects than expected.

That might be worth the tradeoff if there's a benefit. But in practice,
it seems unlikely. We're generally dealing with mmap'd files, so the OS
is going to do a much better job at responding to memory pressure by
dropping individual pages (the exception is systems with NO_MMAP, but
even there the OS can probably respond just as well with swapping).

So the only thing we're really freeing is address space. On 64-bit
systems, we have plenty of that to go around. On 32-bit systems, it
could possibly help. But around the same time we made two other changes:
77ccc5bbd1 (Introduce new config option for mmap limit., 2006-12-23) and
60bb8b1453 (Fully activate the sliding window pack access., 2006-12-23).
Together that means that a 32-bit system should have no more than 256MB
total of packed-git mmaps at one time, split between a few 32MB windows.
It's unlikely we have any address space problems since then, but we
don't have any data since the features were all added at the same time.

Likewise, xmmap() will try to free memory. At first glance, it seems
like we'd need this (when we try to mmap a new window, we might need to
close an old one to save address space on a 32-bit system). But we're
saved again by core.packedGitLimit: if we're going to exceed our 256MB
limit, we'll close an existing window before we even call mmap().

So it seems unlikely that this feature is actually doing anything
useful. And while we don't have reports of it harming anything (probably
because it rarely if ever kicks in), it would be nice to simplify the
system overall. This patch drops the whole try_to_free system from
xmalloc(), as well as the manual pack memory release in xmmap().

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/git-compat-util.h b/git-compat-util.h
index 83be89d..f0d13e4 100644
--- a/git-compat-util.h
+++ b/git-compat-util.h
@@ -818,9 +818,6 @@ const char *inet_ntop(int af, const void *src, char *dst, size_t size);
 int git_atexit(void (*handler)(void));
 #endif
 
-typedef void (*try_to_free_t)(size_t);
-try_to_free_t set_try_to_free_routine(try_to_free_t);
-
 static inline size_t st_add(size_t a, size_t b)
 {
 	if (unsigned_add_overflows(a, b))