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  1. Maven Resolver
  2. MRESOLVER-247

Avoid unnecessary dependency resolution by a Skip solution based on BFS

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Details

    • Improvement
    • Status: Closed
    • Major
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • 1.7.3
    • 1.8.0
    • Resolver
    • None

    Description

      Background

      This Jira is related with MRESOLVER-240 and MRESOLVER-228

      There were discussions about the DFS or BFS algorithm for maven resolver in MRESOLVER-228, Changing to BFS would make MRESOLVER-228 & MRESOLVER-7 much easier to implement. Here is the plan for multiple changes requested recently:

      • DFS > BFS - preparation for parallel download
      • Skip approach - avoid unnecessary version resolution (Covered in this JIRA)
      • Download descriptors in parallel (MRESOLVER-7)

      The phenomenon

      When comes to resolve the huge amount of dependencies of an enterprise level project, the maven resolver is very slow to resolve the dependency graph/tree. Take one of our app as example, it could take 10minutes+ and 16G memory to print out the result of mvn dependency:tree

      This is because there are many dependencies declared in the project, and some of the dependencies would introduce 600+ transitive dependencies, and exclusions are widely used to solve dependency conflicts. 

      By checking the code, we know the exclusion is also part of the cache key. This means when the exclusions up the tree differs, the cached resolution result for the same GAV won't be picked up and need s to be recalculated. 

       

       

      From above figure, we know:

      • In 1st case, D will be resolved only once as there are no exclusions/same exclusions up the tree.
      • In 2nd case, the B and C have different exclusions and D needs to be recalculated, if D is a heavy dependency which introduce many transitive dependencies, all D and its children (D & E in this case) need to be recalculated.  Recalculating all of these nodes introduces 2 issues:
        • Slow in resolving dependencies.
        • Lots of DependencyNodes cached (all calculated/recalculated nodes would be cached) and will consume huge memory.

      Solution

      To improve the speed of maven resolver's dependency resolution,  I implemented a skip approach to avoid unnecessary dependency resolution.

      CASE 1: Skip duplicate node (omitted duplicate case in dependency tree)

      From above figure:

      • The R#3 is resolved at depth 2, in the BFS solution, we already know R#3 is the winner.
      • The R#5 won't be the winner, however here we force resolved this node as it is more left than the last resolved R#3 node. This is because maven picks up widest scope present among conflicting dependencies (scopes of the conflicts may differ), we need to retain the conflict paths by using a strategy like:
        • R#3 locates in coordinate (2 - depth, 2 - sequence in given depth) while R#5 locates in (3,1), R#5 is more left than R#3, so we need to force resolve R#5.
        • If there is a R#6 which is more left than R#5, then need to force resolve R#6.
      • The R#8 is at depth 3 and the R#12 at depth 4 are simply skipped as R#3 is already resolved at depth 2. This is because the same node with deeper depth won't be picked up by maven as maven employs a "nearest transitive dependency in the tree depth and the first in resolution" strategy.

      CASE 2: Skip version conflict (omitted conflict case in dependency tree)

      In above figure.

      • The D1 (D with version 1, #4) is resolved, in the BFS solution, we already know D1 is the winner
      • When comes to resolve D2 (D with version 2, after #4), we know D2 is having a different version and it conflicts with D1, D2 will be skipped as it won't be picked up by maven,  all D2's children won't be resolved then. 

      After we enabled the resolver patch in maven, we are seeing 10% ~70% build time reduced for different projects depend on how complex the dependencies are, and the result of mvn dependency:tree and mvn dependency:list remain the same.

      We've verified the resolver performance patch leveraging an automation solution to certify 2000+ apps of our company by comparing the  mvn dependency:tree and mvn dependency:list result with/without the performance patch.

      Please help review the PR.

      https://github.com/apache/maven-resolver/pull/158

       

      Attachments

        1. exclusion-matters.png
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          wei cai
        2. skip-duplicate.png
          27 kB
          wei cai
        3. skip-version-conflicts.png
          22 kB
          wei cai

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              michael-o Michael Osipov
              wecai wei cai
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