Parallelizing Git Checkout: a case study of I/O parallelism on desktop applications

• Ano de defesa: 2022
• Autor(a) principal: Bernardino, Matheus Tavares
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Git; Network file systems; Paralelismo em E/S; Parallel I/O; Parallel programming; Programação paralela; Sistemas de arquivos em rede; Sistemas de controle de versões; Version control systems
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/45/45134/tde-31082022-210254/

A version control system (VCS) is a tool that tracks and manages the changes made to a set of files over time. More broadly, VCS tools can also help to shape and manage collaboration flows, find and fix bugs, remember the motivations behind a given code change, etc. Although these tools can typically track any type of data, version control systems bring huge benefits to software projects and, as a result, have become standard practice in this field. Among the VCS tools available today, Git is the most popular among developers. This tool is currently being used to version control a variety of repositories, from small personal projects of a few megabytes in size to massive corporate repositories with more than 300 GB and 3.5 million files. For that reason, speed and scalability are among the top priorities for the Git development community. However, the performance of the tool sometimes falls short of what is desired on networked file systems (NFS), where input and output (I/O) operations tend to be more costly. In particular, one Git operation that suffers from these costs is checkout, which is responsible for restoring files from specific versions of a project. Various optimizations were employed on code related to the checkout operation over the years, but the sequential processing of files still carried a large time penalty for NFS, as well as being suboptimal for local file systems on SSDs. In this project, we worked to parallelize the Git checkout machinery, resulting in speedups of up to 4.5x on NFS and 3.6x on SSDs. We also study how parallelism affects the I/O tasks performed by the checkout operation on different machines and storage devices. The parallel checkout feature was incorporated into the upstream Git repository and made available to all users of the tool since version 2.32.0, which was released in June 2021.