refs: implement reference transaction hook

The low-level reference transactions used to update references are
currently completely opaque to the user. While certainly desirable in
most usecases, there are some which might want to hook into the
transaction to observe all queued reference updates as well as observing
the abortion or commit of a prepared transaction.

One such usecase would be to have a set of replicas of a given Git
repository, where we perform Git operations on all of the repositories
at once and expect the outcome to be the same in all of them. While
there exist hooks already for a certain subset of Git commands that
could be used to implement a voting mechanism for this, many others
currently don't have any mechanism for this.

The above scenario is the motivation for the new "reference-transaction"
hook that reaches directly into Git's reference transaction mechanism.
The hook receives as parameter the current state the transaction was
moved to ("prepared", "committed" or "aborted") and gets via its
standard input all queued reference updates. While the exit code gets
ignored in the "committed" and "aborted" states, a non-zero exit code in
the "prepared" state will cause the transaction to be aborted
prematurely.

Given the usecase described above, a voting mechanism can now be
implemented via this hook: as soon as it gets called, it will take all
of stdin and use it to cast a vote to a central service. When all
replicas of the repository agree, the hook will exit with zero,
otherwise it will abort the transaction by returning non-zero. The most
important upside is that this will catch _all_ commands writing
references at once, allowing to implement strong consistency for
reference updates via a single mechanism.

In order to test the impact on the case where we don't have any
"reference-transaction" hook installed in the repository, this commit
introduce two new performance tests for git-update-refs(1). Run against
an empty repository, it produces the following results:

  Test                         origin/master     HEAD
  --------------------------------------------------------------------
  1400.2: update-ref           2.70(2.10+0.71)   2.71(2.10+0.73) +0.4%
  1400.3: update-ref --stdin   0.21(0.09+0.11)   0.21(0.07+0.14) +0.0%

The performance test p1400.2 creates, updates and deletes a branch a
thousand times, thus averaging runtime of git-update-refs over 3000
invocations. p1400.3 instead calls `git-update-refs --stdin` three times
and queues a thousand creations, updates and deletes respectively.

As expected, p1400.3 consistently shows no noticeable impact, as for
each batch of updates there's a single call to access(3P) for the
negative hook lookup. On the other hand, for p1400.2, one can see an
impact caused by this patchset. But doing five runs of the performance
tests where each one was run with GIT_PERF_REPEAT_COUNT=10, the overhead
ranged from -1.5% to +1.1%. These inconsistent performance numbers can
be explained by the overhead of spawning 3000 processes. This shows that
the overhead of assembling the hook path and executing access(3P) once
to check if it's there is mostly outweighed by the operating system's
overhead.

Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 32 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/t/perf/p1400-update-ref.sh b/t/perf/p1400-update-ref.sh
new file mode 100755
index 0000000..d275a81
--- /dev/null
+++ b/t/perf/p1400-update-ref.sh
@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+#!/bin/sh
+
+test_description="Tests performance of update-ref"
+
+. ./perf-lib.sh
+
+test_perf_fresh_repo
+
+test_expect_success "setup" '
+	test_commit PRE &&
+	test_commit POST &&
+	printf "create refs/heads/%d PRE\n" $(test_seq 1000) >create &&
+	printf "update refs/heads/%d POST PRE\n" $(test_seq 1000) >update &&
+	printf "delete refs/heads/%d POST\n" $(test_seq 1000) >delete
+'
+
+test_perf "update-ref" '
+	for i in $(test_seq 1000)
+	do
+		git update-ref refs/heads/branch PRE &&
+		git update-ref refs/heads/branch POST PRE &&
+		git update-ref -d refs/heads/branch
+	done
+'
+
+test_perf "update-ref --stdin" '
+	git update-ref --stdin <create &&
+	git update-ref --stdin <update &&
+	git update-ref --stdin <delete
+'
+
+test_done