gc --auto: exclude base pack if not enough mem to "repack -ad"

pack-objects could be a big memory hog especially on large repos,
everybody knows that. The suggestion to stick a .keep file on the
giant base pack to avoid this problem is also known for a long time.

Recent patches add an option to do just this, but it has to be either
configured or activated manually. This patch lets `git gc --auto`
activate this mode automatically when it thinks `repack -ad` will use
a lot of memory and start affecting the system due to swapping or
flushing OS cache.

gc --auto decides to do this based on an estimation of pack-objects
memory usage, which is quite accurate at least for the heap part, and
whether that fits in half of system memory (the assumption here is for
desktop environment where there are many other applications running).

This mechanism only kicks in if gc.bigBasePackThreshold is not configured.
If it is, it is assumed that the user already knows what they want.

Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/t/t6500-gc.sh b/t/t6500-gc.sh
index c42f60bc5b..818435f04e 100755
--- a/t/t6500-gc.sh
+++ b/t/t6500-gc.sh
@@ -5,6 +5,13 @@ test_description='basic git gc tests
 
 . ./test-lib.sh
 
+test_expect_success 'setup' '
+	# do not let the amount of physical memory affects gc
+	# behavior, make sure we always pack everything to one pack by
+	# default
+	git config gc.bigPackThreshold 2g
+'
+
 test_expect_success 'gc empty repository' '
 	git gc
 '