We normally try to avoid having two auto-gc operations run
at the same time, because it wastes resources. This was done
long ago in 64a99eb47 (gc: reject if another gc is running,
unless --force is given, 2013-08-08).
When we do a detached auto-gc, we run the ref-related
commands _before_ detaching, to avoid confusing lock
contention. This was done by 62aad1849 (gc --auto: do not
lock refs in the background, 2014-05-25).
These two features do not interact well. The pre-detach
operations are run before we check the gc.pid lock, meaning
that on a busy repository we may run many of them
concurrently. Ideally we'd take the lock before spawning any
operations, and hold it for the duration of the program.
This is tricky, though, with the way the pid-file interacts
with the daemonize() process. Other processes will check
that the pid recorded in the pid-file still exists. But
detaching causes us to fork and continue running under a
new pid. So if we take the lock before detaching, the
pid-file will have a bogus pid in it. We'd have to go back
and update it with the new pid after detaching. We'd also
have to play some tricks with the tempfile subsystem to
tweak the "owner" field, so that the parent process does not
clean it up on exit, but the child process does.
Instead, we can do something a bit simpler: take the lock
only for the duration of the pre-detach work, then detach,
then take it again for the post-detach work. Technically,
this means that the post-detach lock could lose to another
process doing pre-detach work. But in the long run this
works out.
That second process would then follow-up by doing
post-detach work. Unless it was in turn blocked by a third
process doing pre-detach work, and so on. This could in
theory go on indefinitely, as the pre-detach work does not
repack, and so need_to_gc() will continue to trigger. But
in each round we are racing between the pre- and post-detach
locks. Eventually, one of the post-detach locks will win the
race and complete the full gc. So in the worst case, we may
racily repeat the pre-detach work, but we would never do so
simultaneously (it would happen via a sequence of serialized
race-wins).
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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