Commit Graph
2 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
retoorandClaude Sonnet 5 684c6d95de Fix pack_write's O(n^2) dedup + correctness bug; document mount table O(n^2)
A audit for other instances of the file-index O(n^2) shape (fixed
previously via the persistent treap) found two more real issues:

1. pack_write's Section 9.2 exact-duplicate elimination was a linear scan
   of every previously-seen (hash, size) pair per entry -- O(n^2) total,
   invisible in the existing benchmark because its identical-content test
   files made every scan match on the first comparison. Measured with
   unique content instead: 80,000 entries took 1.74s, with a 20,000->80,000
   step showing 15.6x for a 4x-N step, matching O(n^2)'s 16x prediction.
   The same scan also trusted a (hash, size) match without ever comparing
   actual bytes -- a latent correctness bug, since FNV-1a64 is explicitly
   not collision-resistant. Fixed both at once with an open-addressing hash
   table (load factor 1/2, linear probing) plus a memcmp verification
   before ever reusing a data_off. Post-fix: 80,000 entries in 0.044s
   (39.6x faster), ratio drops to 3.35x (consistent with O(n)).

   Covered permanently by two new/extended tests: a white-box assertion in
   test_pack_overlay.c that duplicate-content entries share one data_off
   and distinct-content entries do not, and a new
   tests/test_pack_write_perf.c regression tripwire against 10,000 unique
   entries.

2. vfs.c's mount table uses the same full-array-copy-per-write pattern the
   file index used to, confirmed O(n^2) via a new bench/bench.c category
   (500/2,000/8,000 mounts, both 4x-N steps showing 15-20x). Deliberately
   NOT rewritten: mount points are created by a program's own source code,
   not workload-driven, so realistic mount counts never reach the scale
   that made the file index's O(n^2) a real problem. Documented with full
   reasoning in BENCH.md and CLAUDE.md rather than silently left as an
   undocumented gap.

Also fixes a real CI gap the new tests exposed: ci.yml's sanitizer-build
steps never passed -D_GNU_SOURCE when compiling test files (only the
library .o's got it), which was harmless while no test included
internal.h and became a link failure once two did (internal.h needs
_GNU_SOURCE for pthread_rwlock_t). And documents, in CONTRIBUTING.md and
CLAUDE.md, a sandbox flake observed directly during this work's own
sanitizer runs: ASan/UBSan test binaries occasionally fail to start with
AddressSanitizer:DEADLYSIGNAL (sometimes looping rather than exiting),
non-deterministically hitting different unrelated binaries across runs --
a startup race, not a memory-safety bug, confirmed by clean passes on
retry; sanitizer runs in such an environment should be timeout-wrapped.

BENCH.md's "After" table and Appendix B are replaced with the current,
complete 54-measurement bench/bench.c run (the original 45 plus the new
mount-scaling category); the pre-fix 45-measurement "Before" table is kept
as the historical record, per this project's documentation standard.

Verified: make test (all 6 binaries, including the 2 new/changed), a clean
make all, and repeated ASan+UBSan runs (0 real findings; the DEADLYSIGNAL
flake above was observed and correctly distinguished from a real finding
by re-running until a clean pass). TSan could not be run in this sandbox
(pre-existing, documented environment limitation).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UqJpkdJ6Njnt1pw3CbghzB
2026-09-14 09:55:47 +00:00
retoorandClaude Sonnet 5 0b3b207bc0 Add a benchmark suite comparing PackFS against the host filesystem
bench/bench.c (`make bench`) measures create/read/stat/readdir/unlink/
mkdir on mem, dir, and raw fs; large sequential I/O; random-access pack
reads via mmap vs raw fs; compaction throughput; and 8-thread
concurrent mixed workloads. Results from one full run, with honest
analysis (what each "raw fs" vs "raw+fsync" vs "dir" label actually
measures, so they aren't misread as interchangeable), are in BENCH.md.

The benchmark surfaced a real, quantitatively-confirmed finding, not
just favorable numbers: bulk sequential create/unlink on mem/dir is
O(n^2) in file count (~9-22x slower than raw fs at N=20,000), because
every structural write copies the entire snapshot entry array before
publishing it (Section 5.3). concept.md itself names the exact trigger
condition for reconsidering this ("a persistent structurally-shared
tree structure is not required until this assumption is empirically
violated") — this benchmark is that violation, measured rather than
hypothesized: mkdir at N=4,000 vs create at N=20,000 (same mechanism,
5x the N) shows a 28.4x slowdown, matching the O(n^2) prediction (25x)
far better than O(n) (5x).

Also found: dir-backend stat() costs ~2x raw stat() (open+fstat vs one
syscall, the direct cost of openat2 containment on the metadata path);
mem-backed large writes lose to raw fs above ~16MB (Section 5.7's
buffer-growth discipline re-copies prior writes on every capacity
doubling, the price of never exposing a reader to a freed buffer).

Recorded the O(n^2) finding in CLAUDE.md's new "Known performance
characteristics" section, per the same pattern used for the
reclaim_gate use-after-free discovery, since it's exactly the kind of
fact that would otherwise have to be rediscovered by benchmarking
again from scratch. Linked from README and CONTRIBUTING.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UqJpkdJ6Njnt1pw3CbghzB
2026-09-14 07:40:42 +00:00