From: Orgad Shaneh <orgads@gmail.com>

When fetching recursively with submodules, for each ref in the
superproject, we call check_for_new_submodule_commits() which collects all
the objects that have to be checked for submodule changes on
calculate_changed_submodule_paths(). On the first call, it also collects all
the existing refs for excluding them from the scan.

calculate_changed_submodule_paths() creates an argument array with all the
collected new objects, followed by --not and all the old objects. This argv
is passed to setup_revisions, which parses each argument, converts it back
to an oid and resolves the object. The parsing itself also does redundant
work, because it is treated like user input, while in fact it is a full
oid. So it needlessly attempts to look it up as ref (checks if it has ^, ~
etc.), checks if it is a file name etc.

For a repository with many refs, all of this is expensive. But if the fetch
in the superproject did not update the ref (i.e. the objects that are
required to exist in the submodule did not change), there is no need to
include it in the list.

Before commit be76c212 (fetch: ensure submodule objects fetched,
2018-12-06), submodule reference changes were only detected for refs that
were changed, but not for new refs. This commit covered also this case, but
what it did was to just include every ref.

This change should reduce the number of scanned refs by about half (except
the case of a no-op fetch, which will not scan any ref), because all the
existing refs will still be listed after --not.

The regression was reported here:
https://public-inbox.org/git/CAGHpTBKSUJzFSWc=uznSu2zB33qCSmKXM-
iAjxRCpqNK5bnhRg@mail.gmail.com/

Signed-off-by: Orgad Shaneh <orgads@gmail.com>

Submitted-As: https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.720.v2.git.1599227449987.gitgitgadget@gmail.com
In-Reply-To: https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.720.git.1599056635276.gitgitgadget@gmail.com