We insert the commit pointed to by each ref one-by-one into
the "complete" commit_list using insert_by_date. Because
each insertion is O(n), we end up with O(n^2) behavior.
This typically doesn't matter, because the number of refs is
reasonably small. And even if there are a lot of refs, they
often point to a smaller set of objects (in which case the
optimization in commit
ea5f220 keeps our "n" small).
However, in pathological repositories (hundreds of thousands
of refs, each pointing to a unique commit), this quadratic
behavior can make a difference. Since we do not care about
the list order until we have finished building it, we can
simply keep it unsorted during the insertion phase, then
sort it afterwards.
On a repository like the one described above, this dropped
the time to do a no-op fetch from 2.0s to 1.7s. On normal
repositories, it probably does not matter at all, but it
does not hurt to protect ourselves from pathological cases.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>