This is now ready for review.

I did some preliminary measurements of cases with few references in the repository. The performance was tested by timing 10 consecutive runs of the test-suite:

time for i in {1..10}; do ./libgit2_clar; done

Obviously, the methodology is not quite what you'd want for a real measurement.

The results with the changes:

real	2m44.829s
user	1m4.892s
sys	1m40.423s

The results for the commit this PR is based on (d906a87):

real	2m41.803s
user	1m3.824s
sys	1m38.538s

As you can see, the tests took a bit more time with the changes. This was to be somewhat expected, since in the tests, the globs usually select a significant portion of the references. Hence, the additional, albeit superficial, parse of the glob gains more weight.

However, I also saw spurious segfaults for both the master and the feature-branch. Those hit once while running the test for the master and, I think, not for any of the runs for the feature-branch. So maybe the difference is just one run ending earlier.

Anyways, I will repeat those tests again with a script which gives me more informative statistics. I will also do some tests with one of those repos I have with lots of refs (the target scenario for the optimization).

Btw, you could have a look at the durations reported by travis. But I'm too lazy to compare them by hand.

I did some measurements using a little test program. It queries the number of references matching a glob and prints some counters ("real" time, user and kernel ticks):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/times.h>

#include <git2.h>

static const unsigned int runs = 1000;

int countref(const char* name, void* dummy) {
    ++*((unsigned int*) dummy);
    return 0;
}

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    if (argc < 3)
        return 1;

    struct tms res;
    clock_t t1 = times(&res);

    // Run test
    int err;
    git_libgit2_init();

    git_repository* repo;
    err = git_repository_open(&repo, argv[1]);
    if (err != 0)
        return err;

    unsigned int refs = 0;
    for (unsigned int i = 0; i < runs; ++i) {
        err = git_reference_foreach_glob(repo, argv[2], countref, &refs);
        if (err != 0)
            return err;
    }

    git_repository_free(repo);
    git_libgit2_shutdown();

    // Timing
    clock_t t2 = times(&res);
    printf("%ld\t%ld\t%ld\t%d\n", t2 - t1, res.tms_utime, res.tms_stime, refs/runs);
    return 0;
}

I ran the program with three sets of repository and glob:

• query refs/heads/* for the libgit2 repository ("libgit2")
• query refs/remotes/origin/dit/1f280d33e42df23110c74efcf63d2989d653b3fe/* for the git-dit repo ("gitdit1")
• query refs/remotes/origin/dit/022fb5e39d1b6a292ee3e7ca375fb6e4f0997382/* for the git-dit repo ("gitdit2")

Sidenote: git-dit is a distributed issue manager of which I am a co-author. We store messages as commits and use references simply for keeping them alive. For each "issue", we have a sub-directory containing those references. The two scenarios involving git-dit fetch those refs for two separate issues.

Each scenario was run 20 times with both the program linked against the feature-branch version of libgit2 ("enhanced") and the merge base ("master", d906a87).

I found a slight improved performance even for the "libgit2" scenario, although the number of references omitted should be quite low (there are not tags and only a few remote references in addition to the two references I had in the repo). For my target scenarios ("gitdit1" and "gitdit2"), I found an improvement of factors >10.

TL;DR: the patch-set makes globbing refs faster.

For those interested, here are the numbers I got:

"master-libgit2":

30	25	5	2
28	22	4	2
27	22	4	2
28	22	5	2
28	23	4	2
28	23	5	2
28	22	4	2
28	22	5	2
28	22	5	2
28	21	5	2
28	21	5	2
28	22	5	2
28	23	4	2
28	22	5	2
28	21	5	2
27	23	4	2
27	22	5	2
28	22	4	2
28	23	4	2
29	23	5	2

"enhanced-libgit2":

25	23	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
23	21	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	21	0	2
23	21	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	19	3	2
23	21	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
22	20	1	2
23	21	1	2

"master-gitdit1"

110	36	72	6
111	41	69	6
110	39	70	6
110	37	72	6
110	39	69	6
111	41	69	6
111	39	71	6
111	39	72	6
111	41	70	6
115	41	73	6
111	39	71	6
111	38	71	6
110	40	69	6
111	44	66	6
109	36	73	6
110	38	70	6
110	36	73	6
110	37	71	6
109	35	74	6
110	38	71	6

enhanced-gitdit1:

7	4	3	6
8	2	4	6
7	2	4	6
7	2	4	6
7	2	4	6
8	2	5	6
7	1	5	6
7	2	4	6
7	2	4	6
7	2	5	6
7	3	4	6
7	2	4	6
7	2	4	6
7	3	3	6
8	2	4	6
7	2	4	6
7	2	5	6
8	2	4	6
7	2	5	6
7	2	4	6

master-gitdit2:

109	44	64	1
107	35	71	1
108	40	67	1
107	35	71	1
106	43	62	1
110	41	68	1
108	37	70	1
107	34	71	1
107	38	67	1
107	37	69	1
108	41	65	1
109	41	67	1
107	37	69	1
107	38	67	1
107	38	68	1
107	36	70	1
106	39	65	1
108	36	71	1
107	38	68	1
108	36	71	1

enhanced-gitdit2:

2	0	1	1
3	1	1	1
2	1	0	1
2	1	0	1
2	1	1	1
2	1	1	1
2	0	1	1
2	1	1	1
2	1	1	1
2	1	0	1
2	1	0	1
2	1	1	1
3	0	1	1
2	0	1	1
2	0	1	1
2	1	0	1
3	1	0	1
2	0	1	1
2	1	1	1
2	0	1	1

Those two things should have been obvious to me. Guess I'm too used to auto and paranoid -W-flags by now...

I'm ready for squashing as soon as I get an approval.

I decided to squash without an additional review, in order to save a round-trip.

Thanks, looks good to me.

@carlosmn: you've got additional comments?

Thanks again for your contribution!