reftable/block: fix binary search over restart counter

Records store their keys prefix-compressed. As many records will share a
common prefix (e.g. "refs/heads/"), this can end up saving quite a bit
of disk space. The downside of this is that it is not possible to just
seek into the middle of a block and consume the corresponding record
because it may depend on prefixes read from preceding records.

To help with this usecase, the reftable format writes every n'th record
without using prefix compression, which is called a "restart". The list
of restarts is stored at the end of each block so that a reader can
figure out entry points at which to read a full record without having to
read all preceding records.

This allows us to do a binary search over the records in a block when
searching for a particular key by iterating through the restarts until
we have found the section in which our record must be located. From
thereon we perform a linear search to locate the desired record.

This mechanism is broken though. In `block_reader_seek()` we call
`binsearch()` over the count of restarts in the current block. The
function we pass to compare records with each other computes the key at
the current index and then compares it to our search key by calling
`strbuf_cmp()`, returning its result directly. But `binsearch()` expects
us to return a truish value that indicates whether the current index is
smaller than the searched-for key. And unless our key exactly matches
the value at the restart counter we always end up returning a truish
value.

The consequence is that `binsearch()` essentially always returns 0,
indicacting to us that we must start searching right at the beginning of
the block. This works by chance because we now always do a linear scan
from the start of the block, and thus we would still end up finding the
desired record. But needless to say, this makes the optimization quite
useless.

Fix this bug by returning whether the current key is smaller than the
searched key. As the current behaviour was correct it is not possible to
write a test. Furthermore it is also not really possible to demonstrate
in a benchmark that this fix speeds up seeking records.

This may cause the reader to question whether this binary search makes
sense in the first place if it doesn't even help with performance. But
it would end up helping if we were to read a reftable with a much larger
block size. Blocks can be up to 16MB in size, in which case it will
become much more important to avoid the linear scan. We are not yet
ready to read or write such larger blocks though, so we have to live
without a benchmark demonstrating this.

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

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/reftable/block.c b/reftable/block.c
index 72eb73b380..1663030386 100644
--- a/reftable/block.c
+++ b/reftable/block.c
@@ -302,7 +302,7 @@ static int restart_key_less(size_t idx, void *args)
 
 	result = strbuf_cmp(&a->key, &rkey);
 	strbuf_release(&rkey);
-	return result;
+	return result < 0;
 }
 
 void block_iter_copy_from(struct block_iter *dest, struct block_iter *src)