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p4 submit

Commit a pending changelist and the files it contains to the depot.

Syntax

p4 [g-opts] submit [-r -s] [-f submitoption] [--noretransfer 0|1]
p4 [g-opts] submit [-r -s] [-f submitoption] file
p4 [g-opts] submit [-r] [-f submitoption] -d description
p4 [g-opts] submit [-r] [-f submitoption] -d descriptionfile
p4 [g-opts] submit [-r] [-f submitoption] [--noretransfer 0|1] -c change
p4 [g-opts] submit -e shelvedchange
p4 [g-opts] submit -i [-r -s] [-f submitoption] --parallel=threads=N[,batch=N][,min=N]

Description

When a file has been opened by p4 add, p4 edit, p4 delete, or p4 integrate, the file is listed in a changelist. The user’s changes to the file are made only within the client workspace copy until the changelist is sent to the depot with p4 submit.

In addition to the files being submitted, any open stream specification is also submitted. To submit only files and not an open stream spec, run p4 submit -aF. For more information on open stream specifications, see p4 stream.

By default, files are opened within the default changelist, but you can also create new numbered changelists with p4 change.

• To submit the default changelist, use p4 submit.

• To submit a numbered changelist, use p4 submit -c changelist.

  Using the -c option also allows you to change the description information for a numbered changelist.

By default, all files in the changelist are submitted to the depot, and files open for edit, add, and branch are closed when submitted, whether there are any changes to the files or not. To change this default behavior, set the SubmitOptions: field in the p4 client form for your workspace. To override your workspace’s SubmitOptions: setting from the command line, use p4 submit -f submitoption.

When used with the default changelist, p4 submit brings up a form for editing in the editor defined by the EDITOR (or P4EDITOR) environment variable. Files can be deleted from the changelist by deleting them from the form, but these files will remain open in the next default changelist. To close a file and remove it from all changelists, use p4 revert.

All changelists have a Status: field; the value of this field is pending or submitted. Submitted changelists have been successfully submitted with p4 submit; pending changelists have been created by the user but not yet been submitted successfully.

To supply a changelist description from the command line, use the -d option. No change description dialog is presented. The -d option works only with the default changelist, not with numbered changelists.

A file’s location in the depot is determined by its location in the local filesystem and by the client workspace definition, which is specified in the p4 client form. See "Refining Workspace Views" in the Helix Versioning Engine User Guide for more information.

Submit processing

p4 submit works atomically: either all the files listed in the changelist are saved in the depot, or none of them are. The atomic nature of p4 submit allows files to be grouped in a changelists according to their purpose. For example, a single changelist might contain changes to three files that fix a single bug. p4 submit fails if it is interrupted, or if any of the files in the changelist are not found in the current client workspace, are locked in another client workspace (with p4 lock), or require resolution and remain unresolved.

A progress indicator is available for p4 submit if you request it with p4 -I submit.

Before committing a changelist, p4 submit briefly locks all files being submitted. If any file cannot be locked or submitted, the files are left open in a numbered pending changelist. By default, the files in a failed submit operation are left locked unless the submit.unlocklocked configurable is set. Files are unlocked even if they were manually locked prior to submit if submit fails when submit.unlocklocked is set.

If p4 submit fails while processing the default changelist, the changelist is assigned the next number in the changelist sequence, and the default changelist is emptied. The changelist that failed submission must be resubmitted by number after the problems are fixed.

If p4 submit fails, some or all of the files might have been copied to the server. By default, retrying a failed submit transfers all these files again unless the submit.noretransfer configurable is set, in which case the server attempts to detect if the files have already been transferred and does not re-transfer all files when retrying a failed submit. You can use the --noretransfer option to override the submit.noretransfer configurable and allow the user to choose the preferred re-transfer behavior for the current submit operation.

Parallel submits

You can transfer files in parallel during the submit process. If there are sufficient resources, a submit command might execute more rapidly by transferring multiple files in parallel. For this feature to work, you must have both server and client upgraded to version 2015.1 or newer. Please read this section in its entirety to make sure that you are using this feature appropriately.

To enable parallel submits, set the net.parallel.max configurable.

• Specify threads=N to request that files be sent concurrently using the specified number of independent network connections. The threads grab work in batches. You specify batch=N to control the number of files in a batch.

  A submit that is too small will not initiate parallel file transfers. Use the min option to control the minimum number of files in a parallel submit.

  If the net.parallel.max configuration variable is not set, or if the requested number of parallel threads exceeds the value set for net.parallel.max, the command will execute without using parallel threads or will use the maximum number of allowed threads.

• Parallel submits from an edge server to a commit server use standard pull threads to transfer the files. The administrator must ensure that pull threads can be run on the commit server by doing the following:

  • Makes sure that the service user used by the commit server is logged into the edge server.

  • Make sure the ExternalAddress field of the edge server’s server spec is set to the address that will be used by the commit server’s pull threads to connect to the edge server.

    If the commit and edge servers communicate on a network separate from the network used by clients to communicate with the edge server, the ExternalAddress field must specify the network that is used for connections from the commit server. Furthermore, the edge server must listen on the two (or more) networks.

• The --parallel option is ignored when the archives are shared, for p4 submit -e, and when progress indicators are used.

  Note

  To enable automatic parallel processing for p4 submit, set non-zero values for both configurables: net.parallel.max and net.parallel.submit.threads. For example:

  p4 configure set net.parallel.max=50

  p4 configure set net.parallel.submit.threads=3

  If automatic parallel processing is enabled, the following configurables no longer have the default value of 0:

  Configurable	New value	Description
  net.parallel.batch	8	for p4 sync, the number of files in a batch
  net.parallel.batchsize	512 KB	for p4 sync, the number of bytes in a batch
  net.parallel.min	9	for p4 sync, the mininum number of files in a batch
  net.parallel.minsize	576 KB	for p4 sync, the minimum of bytes in a parallel sync
  net.parallel.submit.batch	8	for p4 submit, number of files in a batch
  net.parallel.submit.min	9	or p4 submit, mininum number of files in a batch

  In this case, you can use any of the syntax variants for the p4 submit command (without specifying the --parallel option) and processing will be automatically done in parallel.

  • If you do use the --parallel option explicitly and you have the net.parallel.* configurables set, the configurable values you specify on the command line override the value of the configurables.
    
  • You can turn off automatic parallel submit by unsetting the net.parallel.submit.threads configurable.
  • You can disable the parallel submit configurable settings by specifying p4 submit --parallel=0.

Performance and parallel submits

Using parallel submits improves performance in cases like the following:

• Significant network latency exists somewhere along the path through which the submitted file content travels from the client to the repository where the file content is stored.

  This includes significant network latency between a Proxy and Server, or between an Edge Server and a Commit Server. When using parallel submit in such a configuration, the inherent TCP delays related to network latency occur concurrently, rather than sequentially when not using parallel submit.

• Significant resources are required during the transfer of the submitted file, and those resources are available.

  For example, if significant CPU cycles are required to compress ctext or binary file content as it is transferred from a client to a server, the compression of the file content can occur on one CPU core per parallel submit thread compressing either a ctext or binary file, so long as there are enough available CPU cores.

In other cases, using parallel submit might not result in significant performance benefits:

• In some environments, network bandwidth can be a precious resource.

  If network latency is minimal, it might not take many parallel submit threads to use the available network bandwidth. Once the available network bandwidth is used, adding parallel submit threads might not improve performance. This is especially true when transferring file content for which only network bandwidth resources are needed, such as when transferring ubinary files.

• Using a small value for the batch and min arguments specified with the --parallel option is only practical in some cases.

  For example, if a small number of large ctext or binary files are submitted using parallel submit, transferring a small number of files per parallel submit thread can result in the best performance, provided that adequate CPU and network bandwidth resources are available. In order for parallel submit to transfer an evenly-distributed number of files over the number of parallel submit threads specified (which defaults to four), the batch argument might need to be set to a value lower than its default of eight. (For example, if submitting eight large ctext or binary files using four parallel submit threads, the batch argument should be set to two.) And it follows that the value for the min argument, which defaults to nine, should be set to less than or equal to the number of large ctext or binary files being submitted.

  On the other hand, using a small value for the batch argument can degrade performance when submitting many small files using parallel submit. The overhead of the server frequently querying db.sendq for each batch by each parallel submit thread can result in db.sendq concurrency issues. This is because as the size of the files submitted using parallel submit decreases, the more frequently the server queries db.sendq for the next batch processed by a parallel submit thread.

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Usage Notes

Related Commands