connected: do not sort input revisions

In order to compute whether objects reachable from a set of tips are all
connected, we do a revision walk with these tips as positive references
and `--not --all`. `--not --all` will cause the revision walk to load
all preexisting references as uninteresting, which can be very expensive
in repositories with many references.

Benchmarking the git-rev-list(1) command highlights that by far the most
expensive single phase is initial sorting of the input revisions: after
all references have been loaded, we first sort commits by author date.
In a real-world repository with about 2.2 million references, it makes
up about 40% of the total runtime of git-rev-list(1).

Ultimately, the connectivity check shouldn't really bother about the
order of input revisions at all. We only care whether we can actually
walk all objects until we hit the cut-off point. So sorting the input is
a complete waste of time.

Introduce a new "--unsorted-input" flag to git-rev-list(1) which will
cause it to not sort the commits and adjust the connectivity check to
always pass the flag. This results in the following speedups, executed
in a clone of gitlab-org/gitlab [1]:

    Benchmark #1: git rev-list  --objects --quiet --not --all --not $(cat newrev)
      Time (mean ± σ):      7.639 s ±  0.065 s    [User: 7.304 s, System: 0.335 s]
      Range (min … max):    7.543 s …  7.742 s    10 runs

    Benchmark #2: git rev-list --unsorted-input --objects --quiet --not --all --not $newrev
      Time (mean ± σ):      4.995 s ±  0.044 s    [User: 4.657 s, System: 0.337 s]
      Range (min … max):    4.909 s …  5.048 s    10 runs

    Summary
      'git rev-list --unsorted-input --objects --quiet --not --all --not $(cat newrev)' ran
        1.53 ± 0.02 times faster than 'git rev-list  --objects --quiet --not --all --not $newrev'

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab.git. Note that not all refs
     are visible to clients.

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

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt b/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
index 24569b06d1..b7bd27e171 100644
--- a/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
@@ -968,6 +968,11 @@ list of the missing objects.  Object IDs are prefixed with a ``?'' character.
 	objects.
 endif::git-rev-list[]
 
+--unsorted-input::
+	Show commits in the order they were given on the command line instead
+	of sorting them in reverse chronological order by commit time. Cannot
+	be combined with `--no-walk` or `--no-walk=sorted`.
+
 --no-walk[=(sorted|unsorted)]::
 	Only show the given commits, but do not traverse their ancestors.
 	This has no effect if a range is specified. If the argument
@@ -975,7 +980,8 @@ endif::git-rev-list[]
 	given on the command line. Otherwise (if `sorted` or no argument
 	was given), the commits are shown in reverse chronological order
 	by commit time.
-	Cannot be combined with `--graph`.
+	Cannot be combined with `--graph`. Cannot be combined with
+	`--unsorted-input` if `sorted` or no argument was given.
 
 --do-walk::
 	Overrides a previous `--no-walk`.