Taylor and I noticed a slowdown in p1451 between v2.20.1 and v2.21.0. I
was surprised to find that it bisects to bbb15c5193 (fsck: reduce word
legos to help i18n, 2018-11-10).

The important part, as it turns out, is the switch to using fprintf_ln()
instead of a regular fprintf() with a "\n" in it. Doing this:

diff --git a/builtin/fsck.c b/builtin/fsck.c
index d26fb0a044..234b766843 100644
--- a/builtin/fsck.c
+++ b/builtin/fsck.c
@@ -128,12 +128,12 @@ static int fsck_error_func(struct fsck_options *o,
        switch (type) {
        case FSCK_WARN:
                /* TRANSLATORS: e.g. warning in tree 01bfda: <more explanation> 
*/
-               fprintf_ln(stderr, _("warning in %s %s: %s"),
+               fprintf(stderr, _("warning in %s %s: %s\n"),
                           printable_type(obj), describe_object(obj), message);
                return 0;
        case FSCK_ERROR:
                /* TRANSLATORS: e.g. error in tree 01bfda: <more explanation> */
-               fprintf_ln(stderr, _("error in %s %s: %s"),
+               fprintf(stderr, _("error in %s %s: %s\n"),
                           printable_type(obj), describe_object(obj), message);
                return 1;
        default:

on top of the current tip of master yields this result:

  Test                                             HEAD^             HEAD       
           
  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  1451.3: fsck with 0 skipped bad commits          9.78(7.46+2.32)   
8.74(7.38+1.36) -10.6%
  1451.5: fsck with 1 skipped bad commits          9.78(7.66+2.11)   
8.49(7.04+1.44) -13.2%
  1451.7: fsck with 10 skipped bad commits         9.83(7.45+2.37)   
8.53(7.26+1.24) -13.2%
  1451.9: fsck with 100 skipped bad commits        9.87(7.47+2.40)   
8.54(7.24+1.30) -13.5%
  1451.11: fsck with 1000 skipped bad commits      9.79(7.67+2.12)   
8.48(7.25+1.23) -13.4%
  1451.13: fsck with 10000 skipped bad commits     9.86(7.58+2.26)   
8.38(7.09+1.28) -15.0%
  1451.15: fsck with 100000 skipped bad commits    9.58(7.39+2.19)   
8.41(7.21+1.19) -12.2%
  1451.17: fsck with 1000000 skipped bad commits   6.38(6.31+0.07)   
6.35(6.26+0.07) -0.5% 

That test makes a repo with a million bad commits. Most of those (except
the last one, which doesn't see a huge change!) tests are outputting
900k+ error messages. So small changes in the speed of printing are
amplified.

This is a totally synthetic repo. So as a real-world case, these numbers
are probably not all that interesting. If you have a million-line fsck
output, the extra 1s of output time is probably not biggest thing on
your mind. But we do use fprintf_ln() elsewhere, and I wonder if there
are cases where it could add up.

I thought it might be due to stdio's locking overhead (we ran into that
with single-character getc's in other code). But there's no unlocked
variant of the formatting functions, so the best we can do is this:

diff --git a/strbuf.c b/strbuf.c
index 0e18b259ce..fac3b33f68 100644
--- a/strbuf.c
+++ b/strbuf.c
@@ -882,12 +882,18 @@ int fprintf_ln(FILE *fp, const char *fmt, ...)
 {
        int ret;
        va_list ap;
+
+       flockfile(fp);
+
        va_start(ap, fmt);
        ret = vfprintf(fp, fmt, ap);
        va_end(ap);
-       if (ret < 0 || putc('\n', fp) == EOF)
-               return -1;
-       return ret + 1;
+
+       if (ret >= 0 && putc_unlocked('\n', fp) != EOF)
+               ret++;
+
+       funlockfile(fp);
+       return ret;
 }
 
 char *xstrdup_tolower(const char *string)

which doesn't seem to help. I don't know if this is even worth digging
into, or if we should declare that "yeah, fprintf_ln is not the fastest
way to print something; don't use it in a tight loop".

But maybe somebody else has a brilliant idea.

-Peff

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