block alloc: allocate cache entries from mem_pool

When reading large indexes from disk, a portion of the time is
dominated in malloc() calls. This can be mitigated by allocating a
large block of memory and manage it ourselves via memory pools.

This change moves the cache entry allocation to be on top of memory
pools.

Design:

The index_state struct will gain a notion of an associated memory_pool
from which cache_entries will be allocated from. When reading in the
index from disk, we have information on the number of entries and
their size, which can guide us in deciding how large our initial
memory allocation should be. When an index is discarded, the
associated memory_pool will be discarded as well - so the lifetime of
a cache_entry is tied to the lifetime of the index_state that it was
allocated for.

In the case of a Split Index, the following rules are followed. 1st,
some terminology is defined:

Terminology:
  - 'the_index': represents the logical view of the index

  - 'split_index': represents the "base" cache entries. Read from the
    split index file.

'the_index' can reference a single split_index, as well as
cache_entries from the split_index. `the_index` will be discarded
before the `split_index` is.  This means that when we are allocating
cache_entries in the presence of a split index, we need to allocate
the entries from the `split_index`'s memory pool.  This allows us to
follow the pattern that `the_index` can reference cache_entries from
the `split_index`, and that the cache_entries will not be freed while
they are still being referenced.

Managing transient cache_entry structs:
Cache entries are usually allocated for an index, but this is not always
the case. Cache entries are sometimes allocated because this is the
type that the existing checkout_entry function works with. Because of
this, the existing code needs to handle cache entries associated with an
index / memory pool, and those that only exist transiently. Several
strategies were contemplated around how to handle this:

Chosen approach:
An extra field was added to the cache_entry type to track whether the
cache_entry was allocated from a memory pool or not. This is currently
an int field, as there are no more available bits in the existing
ce_flags bit field. If / when more bits are needed, this new field can
be turned into a proper bit field.

Alternatives:

1) Do not include any information about how the cache_entry was
allocated. Calling code would be responsible for tracking whether the
cache_entry needed to be freed or not.
  Pro: No extra memory overhead to track this state
  Con: Extra complexity in callers to handle this correctly.

The extra complexity and burden to not regress this behavior in the
future was more than we wanted.

2) cache_entry would gain knowledge about which mem_pool allocated it
  Pro: Could (potentially) do extra logic to know when a mem_pool no
       longer had references to any cache_entry
  Con: cache_entry would grow heavier by a pointer, instead of int

We didn't see a tangible benefit to this approach

3) Do not add any extra information to a cache_entry, but when freeing a
   cache entry, check if the memory exists in a region managed by existing
   mem_pools.
  Pro: No extra memory overhead to track state
  Con: Extra computation is performed when freeing cache entries

We decided tracking and iterating over known memory pool regions was
less desirable than adding an extra field to track this stae.

Signed-off-by: Jameson Miller <jamill@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 11 deletions

diff --git a/unpack-trees.c b/unpack-trees.c
index 33cba55..a3b5131 100644
--- a/unpack-trees.c
+++ b/unpack-trees.c
@@ -203,20 +203,11 @@ static int do_add_entry(struct unpack_trees_options *o, struct cache_entry *ce,
 			       ADD_CACHE_OK_TO_ADD | ADD_CACHE_OK_TO_REPLACE);
 }
 
-static struct cache_entry *dup_entry(const struct cache_entry *ce, struct index_state *istate)
-{
-	unsigned int size = ce_size(ce);
-	struct cache_entry *new_entry = make_empty_cache_entry(istate, ce_namelen(ce));
-
-	memcpy(new_entry, ce, size);
-	return new_entry;
-}
-
 static void add_entry(struct unpack_trees_options *o,
 		      const struct cache_entry *ce,
 		      unsigned int set, unsigned int clear)
 {
-	do_add_entry(o, dup_entry(ce, &o->result), set, clear);
+	do_add_entry(o, dup_cache_entry(ce, &o->result), set, clear);
 }
 
 /*
@@ -1802,7 +1793,7 @@ static int merged_entry(const struct cache_entry *ce,
 			struct unpack_trees_options *o)
 {
 	int update = CE_UPDATE;
-	struct cache_entry *merge = dup_entry(ce, &o->result);
+	struct cache_entry *merge = dup_cache_entry(ce, &o->result);
 
 	if (!old) {
 		/*