[PATCH] odb/files: be less aggressive with geometric repacking

When performing auto-maintenance with geometric repacking we have two
conditions that may trigger a repack:

  - Either the geometric sequence of packfiles is invalidated.

  - Or we have too many loose objects.

The first condition shouldn't trigger all that often: it may be hit when
we fetch a new packfile, but users tend to not do that all the time. The
second condition is what typically triggers more regularly though, as
every command that ends up writing new objects may cause us to cross the
threshold of loose objects. It is thus preferable to not be too
aggressive here, as otherwise we may end up repacking objects quite
often.

For the geometric-repacking strategy though we have a default of 100
objects, only. As we're approximating the count of objects by only
reading the "objects/17/" shared, we'd only need 2 objects in there
before we perform a repack by default, which is quite aggressive.
git-gc(1) on the other hand has a default of 6700, so it is quite a bit
more conservative here.

Being this aggressive is also causing problems as reported by our users.
When running lots of concurrent writers, those writes will constantly
end up spawning maintenance jobs that end up repacking objects. As we
also prune objects, a concurrently running process that tries to write
an object may see that the sharding directories get removed under their
feet. While we try re-creating such leading directories, we only do so a
single time, and it may happen that the directory vanishes again before
we had the chance to create the loose object. This is not a new problem,
but it is exacerbated by us running maintenance this aggressively.

Improve the status quo by reducing the frequency at which we pack loose
objects to the same frequency that git-gc(1) uses.

Reported-by: Stefan Haller <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <[email protected]>
---
Hi,

as reported by Stefan at [1]. Thanks!

Patrick

[1]: <[email protected]>
---
 Documentation/config/maintenance.adoc | 2 +-
 odb/source-files.c                    | 2 +-
 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/config/maintenance.adoc b/Documentation/config/maintenance.adoc
index b578856dde..da8be9f812 100644
--- a/Documentation/config/maintenance.adoc
+++ b/Documentation/config/maintenance.adoc
@@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ maintenance.geometric-repack.auto::
 	there are packfiles that need to be merged together to retain the
 	geometric progression, or when there are at least this many loose
 	objects that would be written into a new packfile. The default value is
-	100.
+	6700.
 
 maintenance.geometric-repack.splitFactor::
 	This integer config option controls the factor used for the geometric
diff --git a/odb/source-files.c b/odb/source-files.c
index 5a68af7d84..555e466145 100644
--- a/odb/source-files.c
+++ b/odb/source-files.c
@@ -521,7 +521,7 @@ bool odb_source_files_optimize_required(struct odb_source *source,
 		};
 		struct existing_packs existing_packs = EXISTING_PACKS_INIT;
 		struct string_list kept_packs = STRING_LIST_INIT_DUP;
-		int auto_value = 100;
+		int auto_value = 6700;
 		bool ret;
 
 		repo_config_get_int(repo, "maintenance.geometric-repack.auto",

---
base-commit: 010afd3166ddc64c9863b1506f12cbcdda0d4ea1
change-id: 20260810-pks-geometric-maintenance-reduce-frequency-5c1c9423ceb3