grep: re-enable threads in non-worktree case

matheustavares · gitster · commit 1184a95ea21e · 2020-01-17T13:52:14.000-08:00
They were disabled at 53b8d93 ("grep: disable threading in non-worktree
case", 12-12-2011), due to observable performance drops (to the point
that using a single thread would be faster than multiple threads). But
now that zlib inflation can be performed in parallel we can regain the
speedup, so let's re-enable threads in non-worktree grep.

Grepping 'abcd[02]' ("Regex 1") and '(static|extern) (int|double) \*'
("Regex 2") at chromium's repository[1] I got:

 Threads |   Regex 1  |  Regex 2
---------|------------|-----------
    1    |  17.2920s  |  20.9624s
    2    |   9.6512s  |  11.3184s
    4    |   6.7723s  |   7.6268s
    8**  |   6.2886s  |   6.9843s

These are all means of 30 executions after 2 warmup runs. All tests were
executed on an i7-7700HQ (quad-core w/ hyper-threading), 16GB of RAM and
SSD, running Manjaro Linux. But to make sure the optimization also
performs well on HDD, the tests were repeated on another machine with an
i5-4210U (dual-core w/ hyper-threading), 8GB of RAM and HDD (SATA III,
5400 rpm), also running Manjaro Linux:

 Threads |   Regex 1  |  Regex 2
---------|------------|-----------
    1    |  18.4035s  |  22.5368s
    2    |  12.5063s  |  14.6409s
    4**  |  10.9136s  |  12.7106s

** Note that in these cases we relied on hyper-threading, and that's
   probably why we don't see a big difference in time.

Unfortunately, multithreaded git-grep might be slow in the non-worktree
case when --textconv is used and there're too many text conversions.
Probably the reason for this is that the object read lock is used to
protect fill_textconv() and therefore there is a mutual exclusion
between textconv execution and object reading. Because both are
time-consuming operations, not being able to perform them in parallel
can cause performance drops. To inform the users about this (and other
threading details), let's also add a "NOTES ON THREADS" section to
Documentation/git-grep.txt.

[1]: chromium’s repo at commit 03ae96f (“Add filters testing at DSF=2”,
     04-06-2019), after a 'git gc' execution.

Signed-off-by: Matheus Tavares &lt;matheus.bernardino@usp.br&gt;
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano &lt;gitster@pobox.com&gt;
diff --git a/Documentation/git-grep.txt b/Documentation/git-grep.txt
@@ -347,6 +347,17 @@ EXAMPLES
 `git grep solution -- :^Documentation`::
 	Looks for `solution`, excluding files in `Documentation`.
 
+NOTES ON THREADS
+----------------
+
+The `--threads` option (and the grep.threads configuration) will be ignored when
+`--open-files-in-pager` is used, forcing a single-threaded execution.
+
+When grepping the object store (with `--cached` or giving tree objects), running
+with multiple threads might perform slower than single threaded if `--textconv`
+is given and there're too many text conversions. So if you experience low
+performance in this case, it might be desirable to use `--threads=1`.
+
 GIT
 ---
 Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite
diff --git a/builtin/grep.c b/builtin/grep.c
@@ -1054,7 +1054,7 @@ int cmd_grep(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 	if (recurse_submodules && (!use_index || untracked))
 		die(_("option not supported with --recurse-submodules"));
 
-	if (list.nr || cached || show_in_pager) {
+	if (show_in_pager) {
 		if (num_threads > 1)
 			warning(_("invalid option combination, ignoring --threads"));
 		num_threads = 1;
