grep: use no. of cores as the default no. of threads

When --threads is not specified, git-grep will use 8 threads by default.
This fixed number may be too many for machines with fewer cores and too
little for machines with more cores. So, instead, use the number of
logical cores available in the machine, which seems to result in the
best overall performance: The following measurements correspond to the
mean elapsed times for 30 git-grep executions in chromium's
repository[1] with a 95% confidence interval (each set of 30 were
performed after 2 warmup runs). Regex 1 is 'abcd[02]' and Regex 2 is
'(static|extern) (int|double) \*'.

      |          Working tree         |           Object Store
------|-------------------------------|--------------------------------
 #ths |  Regex 1      |  Regex 2      |   Regex 1      |   Regex 2
------|---------------|---------------|----------------|---------------
  32  |  2.92s ± 0.01 |  3.72s ± 0.21 |   5.36s ± 0.01 |   6.07s ± 0.01
  16  |  2.84s ± 0.01 |  3.57s ± 0.21 |   5.05s ± 0.01 |   5.71s ± 0.01
>  8  |  2.53s ± 0.00 |  3.24s ± 0.21 |   4.86s ± 0.01 |   5.48s ± 0.01
   4  |  2.43s ± 0.02 |  3.22s ± 0.20 |   5.22s ± 0.02 |   6.03s ± 0.02
   2  |  3.06s ± 0.20 |  4.52s ± 0.01 |   7.52s ± 0.01 |   9.06s ± 0.01
   1  |  6.16s ± 0.01 |  9.25s ± 0.02 |  14.10s ± 0.01 |  17.22s ± 0.01

The above tests were performed in a desktop running Debian 10.0 with
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 V2 (4 cores w/ hyper-threading), 32GB of
RAM and a 7200 rpm, SATA 3.1 HDD.

Bellow, the tests were repeated for a machine with SSD: a Manjaro laptop
with Intel(R) i7-7700HQ (4 cores w/ hyper-threading) and 16GB of RAM:

      |          Working tree          |           Object Store
------|--------------------------------|--------------------------------
 #ths |  Regex 1      |  Regex 2       |   Regex 1      |   Regex 2
------|---------------|----------------|----------------|---------------
  32  |  3.29s ± 0.21 |   4.30s ± 0.01 |   6.30s ± 0.01 |   7.30s ± 0.02
  16  |  3.19s ± 0.20 |   4.14s ± 0.02 |   5.91s ± 0.01 |   6.83s ± 0.01
>  8  |  2.90s ± 0.04 |   3.82s ± 0.20 |   5.70s ± 0.02 |   6.53s ± 0.01
   4  |  2.84s ± 0.02 |   3.77s ± 0.20 |   6.19s ± 0.02 |   7.18s ± 0.02
   2  |  3.73s ± 0.21 |   5.57s ± 0.02 |   9.28s ± 0.01 |  11.22s ± 0.01
   1  |  7.48s ± 0.02 |  11.36s ± 0.03 |  17.75s ± 0.01 |  21.87s ± 0.08

[1]: chromium’s repo at commit 03ae96f (“Add filters testing at DSF=2”,
     04-06-2019), after a 'git gc' execution.

Signed-off-by: Matheus Tavares <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>

Author: matheustavares

Documentation/git-grep.txt

@@ -59,8 +59,8 @@ grep.extendedRegexp::
 	other than 'default'.
 
 grep.threads::
-	Number of grep worker threads to use.  If unset (or set to 0),
-	8 threads are used by default (for now).
+	Number of grep worker threads to use. If unset (or set to 0), Git will
+	use as many threads as the number of logical cores available.
 
 grep.fullName::
 	If set to true, enable `--full-name` option by default.

builtin/grep.c

@@ -33,7 +33,6 @@ static char const * const grep_usage[] = {
 
 static int recurse_submodules;
 
-#define GREP_NUM_THREADS_DEFAULT 8
 static int num_threads;
 
 static pthread_t *threads;
@@ -1064,7 +1063,7 @@ int cmd_grep(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 	} else if (num_threads < 0)
 		die(_("invalid number of threads specified (%d)"), num_threads);
 	else if (num_threads == 0)
-		num_threads = HAVE_THREADS ? GREP_NUM_THREADS_DEFAULT : 1;
+		num_threads = HAVE_THREADS ? online_cpus() : 1;
 
 	if (num_threads > 1) {
 		if (!HAVE_THREADS)