Jeff King authored Mar 27, 2015 and Junio C Hamano committed Apr 20, 2015

When pruning and repacking a repository that has an
alternate object store configured, we may traverse a large
number of objects in the alternate. This serves no purpose,
and may be expensive to do. A longer explanation is below.

Commits d3038d22 and abcb8655 taught prune and pack-objects
(respectively) to treat "recent" objects as tips for
reachability, so that we keep whole chunks of history. They
built on the object traversal in 660c889e

 (sha1_file: add
for_each iterators for loose and packed objects,
2014-10-15), which covers both local and alternate objects.

In both cases, covering alternate objects is unnecessary, as
both commands can only drop objects from the local
repository. In the case of prune, we traverse only the local
object directory. And in the case of repacking, while we may
or may not include local objects in our pack, we will never
reach into the alternate with "repack -d". The "-l" option
is only a question of whether we are migrating objects from
the alternate into our repository, or leaving them
untouched.

It is possible that we may drop an object that is depended
upon by another object in the alternate. For example,
imagine two repositories, A and B, with A pointing to B as
an alternate. Now imagine a commit that is in B which
references a tree that is only in A. Traversing from recent
objects in B might prevent A from dropping that tree. But
this case isn't worth covering. Repo B should take
responsibility for its own objects. It would never have had
the commit in the first place if it did not also have the
tree, and assuming it is using the same "keep recent chunks
of history" scheme, then it would itself keep the tree, as
well.

So checking the alternate objects is not worth doing, and
come with a significant performance impact. In both cases,
we skip any recent objects that have already been marked
SEEN (i.e., that we know are already reachable for prune, or
included in the pack for a repack). So there is a slight
waste of time in opening the alternate packs at all, only to
notice that we have already considered each object. But much
worse, the alternate repository may have a large number of
objects that are not reachable from the local repository at
all, and we end up adding them to the traversal.

We can fix this by considering only local unseen objects.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>