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Git walks the commit graph for many reasons, including:
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Listing and filtering commit history.
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Computing merge bases.
These operations can become slow as the commit count grows. The merge base calculation shows up in many user-facing commands, such as merge-base or status and can take minutes to compute depending on history shape.
There are two main costs here:
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Decompressing and parsing commits.
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Walking the entire graph to satisfy topological order constraints.
The commit graph file is a supplemental data structure that accelerates commit graph walks. If a user downgrades or disables the core.commitGraph config setting, then the existing ODB is sufficient. The file is stored as "commit-graph" either in the .git/objects/info directory or in the info directory of an alternate.
The commit graph file stores the commit graph structure along with some extra metadata to speed up graph walks. By listing commit OIDs in lexi- cographic order, we can identify an integer position for each commit and refer to the parents of a commit using those integer positions. We use binary search to find initial commits and then use the integer positions for fast lookups during the walk.
A consumer may load the following info for a commit from the graph:
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The commit OID.
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The list of parents, along with their integer position.
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The commit date.
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The root tree OID.
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The generation number (see definition below).
Values 1-4 satisfy the requirements of parse_commit_gently().
Define the "generation number" of a commit recursively as follows:
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A commit with no parents (a root commit) has generation number one.
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A commit with at least one parent has generation number one more than the largest generation number among its parents.
Equivalently, the generation number of a commit A is one more than the length of a longest path from A to a root commit. The recursive definition is easier to use for computation and observing the following property:
If A and B are commits with generation numbers N and M, respectively, and N <= M, then A cannot reach B. That is, we know without searching that B is not an ancestor of A because it is further from a root commit than A.
Conversely, when checking if A is an ancestor of B, then we only need to walk commits until all commits on the walk boundary have generation number at most N. If we walk commits using a priority queue seeded by generation numbers, then we always expand the boundary commit with highest generation number and can easily detect the stopping condition.
This property can be used to significantly reduce the time it takes to walk commits and determine topological relationships. Without generation numbers, the general heuristic is the following:
If A and B are commits with commit time X and Y, respectively, and X < Y, then A _probably_ cannot reach B.
This heuristic is currently used whenever the computation is allowed to violate topological relationships due to clock skew (such as "git log" with default order), but is not used when the topological order is required (such as merge base calculations, "git log --graph").
In practice, we expect some commits to be created recently and not stored in the commit graph. We can treat these commits as having "infinite" generation number and walk until reaching commits with known generation number.
Design Details
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The commit graph file is stored in a file named commit-graph in the .git/objects/info directory. This could be stored in the info directory of an alternate.
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The core.commitGraph config setting must be on to consume graph files.
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The file format includes parameters for the object ID hash function, so a future change of hash algorithm does not require a change in format.
Future Work
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The commit graph feature currently does not honor commit grafts. This can be remedied by duplicating or refactoring the current graft logic.
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The commit-graph subcommand does not have a "verify" mode that is necessary for integration with fsck.
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The file format includes room for precomputed generation numbers. These are not currently computed, so all generation numbers will be marked as 0 (or "uncomputed"). A later patch will include this calculation.
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After computing and storing generation numbers, we must make graph walks aware of generation numbers to gain the performance benefits they enable. This will mostly be accomplished by swapping a commit-date-ordered priority queue with one ordered by generation number. The following operations are important candidates:
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paint_down_to_common()
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log --topo-order
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Currently, parse_commit_gently() requires filling in the root tree object for a commit. This passes through lookup_tree() and consequently lookup_object(). Also, it calls lookup_commit() when loading the parents. These method calls check the ODB for object existence, even if the consumer does not need the content. For example, we do not need the tree contents when computing merge bases. Now that commit parsing is removed from the computation time, these lookup operations are the slowest operations keeping graph walks from being fast. Consider loading these objects without verifying their existence in the ODB and only loading them fully when consumers need them. Consider a method such as "ensure_tree_loaded(commit)" that fully loads a tree before using commit→tree.
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The current design uses the commit-graph subcommand to generate the graph. When this feature stabilizes enough to recommend to most users, we should add automatic graph writes to common operations that create many commits. For example, one could compute a graph on clone, fetch, or repack commands.
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A server could provide a commit graph file as part of the network protocol to avoid extra calculations by clients. This feature is only of benefit if the user is willing to trust the file, because verifying the file is correct is as hard as computing it from scratch.
Related Links
[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/git/issues/detail?id=8 Chromium work item for: Serialized Commit Graph
[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/20110713070517.GC18566@sigill.intra.peff.net/ An abandoned patch that introduced generation numbers.
[2] https://public-inbox.org/git/20170908033403.q7e6dj7benasrjes@sigill.intra.peff.net/ Discussion about generation numbers on commits and how they interact with fsck.
[3] https://public-inbox.org/git/20170908034739.4op3w4f2ma5s65ku@sigill.intra.peff.net/ More discussion about generation numbers and not storing them inside commit objects. A valuable quote:
"I think we should be moving more in the direction of keeping repo-local caches for optimizations. Reachability bitmaps have been a big performance win. I think we should be doing the same with our properties of commits. Not just generation numbers, but making it cheap to access the graph structure without zlib-inflating whole commit objects (i.e., packv4 or something like the "metapacks" I proposed a few years ago)."
[4] https://public-inbox.org/git/20180108154822.54829-1-git@jeffhostetler.com/T/#u A patch to remove the ahead-behind calculation from status.