reftable/merged: allocation-less dropping of shadowed records

The purpose of the merged reftable iterator is to iterate through all
entries of a set of tables in the correct order. This is implemented by
using a sub-iterator for each table, where the next entry of each of
these iterators gets put into a priority queue. For each iteration, we
do roughly the following steps:

  1. Retrieve the top record of the priority queue. This is the entry we
     want to return to the caller.

  2. Retrieve the next record of the sub-iterator that this record came
     from. If any, add it to the priority queue at the correct position.
     The position is determined by comparing the record keys, which e.g.
     corresponds to the refname for ref records.

  3. Keep removing the top record of the priority queue until we hit the
     first entry whose key is larger than the returned record's key.
     This is required to drop "shadowed" records.

The last step will lead to at least one comparison to the next entry,
but may lead to many comparisons in case the reftable stack consists of
many tables with shadowed records. It is thus part of the hot code path
when iterating through records.

The code to compare the entries with each other is quite inefficient
though. Instead of comparing record keys with each other directly, we
first format them into `struct strbuf`s and only then compare them with
each other. While we already optimized this code path to reuse buffers
in 829231dc20 (reftable/merged: reuse buffer to compute record keys,
2023-12-11), the cost to format the keys into the buffers still adds up
quite significantly.

Refactor the code to use `reftable_record_cmp()` instead, which has been
introduced in the preceding commit. This function compares records with
each other directly without requiring any memory allocations or copying
and is thus way more efficient.

The following benchmark uses git-show-ref(1) to print a single ref
matching a pattern out of 1 million refs. This is the most direct way to
exercise ref iteration speed as we remove all overhead of having to show
the refs, too.

    Benchmark 1: show-ref: single matching ref (revision = HEAD~)
      Time (mean ± σ):     180.7 ms ±   4.7 ms    [User: 177.1 ms, System: 3.4 ms]
      Range (min … max):   174.9 ms … 211.7 ms    1000 runs

    Benchmark 2: show-ref: single matching ref (revision = HEAD)
      Time (mean ± σ):     162.1 ms ±   4.4 ms    [User: 158.5 ms, System: 3.4 ms]
      Range (min … max):   155.4 ms … 189.3 ms    1000 runs

    Summary
      show-ref: single matching ref (revision = HEAD) ran
        1.11 ± 0.04 times faster than show-ref: single matching ref (revision = HEAD~)

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

2 files changed, 2 insertions, 11 deletions

diff --git a/reftable/merged.c b/reftable/merged.c
index c258ce953e..fb9978d798 100644
--- a/reftable/merged.c
+++ b/reftable/merged.c
@@ -51,8 +51,6 @@ static void merged_iter_close(void *p)
 		reftable_iterator_destroy(&mi->stack[i]);
 	}
 	reftable_free(mi->stack);
-	strbuf_release(&mi->key);
-	strbuf_release(&mi->entry_key);
 }
 
 static int merged_iter_advance_nonnull_subiter(struct merged_iter *mi,
@@ -105,14 +103,11 @@ static int merged_iter_next_entry(struct merged_iter *mi,
 	  such a deployment, the loop below must be changed to collect all
 	  entries for the same key, and return new the newest one.
 	*/
-	reftable_record_key(&entry.rec, &mi->entry_key);
 	while (!merged_iter_pqueue_is_empty(mi->pq)) {
 		struct pq_entry top = merged_iter_pqueue_top(mi->pq);
-		int cmp = 0;
+		int cmp;
 
-		reftable_record_key(&top.rec, &mi->key);
-
-		cmp = strbuf_cmp(&mi->key, &mi->entry_key);
+		cmp = reftable_record_cmp(&top.rec, &entry.rec);
 		if (cmp > 0)
 			break;
 
@@ -246,8 +241,6 @@ static int merged_table_seek_record(struct reftable_merged_table *mt,
 		.typ = reftable_record_type(rec),
 		.hash_id = mt->hash_id,
 		.suppress_deletions = mt->suppress_deletions,
-		.key = STRBUF_INIT,
-		.entry_key = STRBUF_INIT,
 	};
 	int n = 0;
 	int err = 0;
diff --git a/reftable/merged.h b/reftable/merged.h
index d5b39dfe7f..7d9f95d27e 100644
--- a/reftable/merged.h
+++ b/reftable/merged.h
@@ -31,8 +31,6 @@ struct merged_iter {
 	uint8_t typ;
 	int suppress_deletions;
 	struct merged_iter_pqueue pq;
-	struct strbuf key;
-	struct strbuf entry_key;
 };
 
 void merged_table_release(struct reftable_merged_table *mt);