On Fri, Mar 16 2018, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy jotted: > This config allows us to keep <N> packs back if their size is larger > than a limit. But if this N >= gc.autoPackLimit, we may have a > problem. We are supposed to reduce the number of packs after a > threshold because it affects performance. > > We could tell the user that they have incompatible gc.bigPackThreshold > and gc.autoPackLimit, but it's kinda hard when 'git gc --auto' runs in > background. Instead let's fall back to the next best stategy: try to > reduce the number of packs anyway, but keep the base pack out. This > reduces the number of packs to two and hopefully won't take up too > much resources to repack (the assumption still is the base pack takes > most resources to handle).
I think this strategy makes perfect sense. Those with say a 1GB "base" pack might set this setting at to 500MB or something large like that, then it's realistically never going to happen that you're going to then have a collision between gc.bigPackThreshold and gc.autoPackLimit, even if your checkout is many years old *maybe* you've accumulated 5-10 of those 500MB packs for any sane repo. But this also allows for setting this value really low, e.g. 50MB or something to place a very low upper bound on how much memory GC takes on a regular basis, but of course you'll need to repack that set of 50MB's eventually. Great!
