[8.16](backport #6058) Don't deepcopy AST when generating vars #6111
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
What does this PR do?
We generate vars from mappings from both context providers and dynamic providers. Dynamic providers can produce multiple var entries - the Kubernetes provider will do so for each Pod, for example. When that happens, we currently make a deep copy of the context provider mapping, and add the dynamic provider mapping as a key.
As we don't modify the mappings, this deep copy can be replaced by a shallow copy. This PR introduces shallow copying to the AST and uses it when generating vars, leading to a major performance improvement.
Why is it important?
All these deep copies can be quite expensive when there's a lot of mappings from the dynamic provider. See the benchstat report below:
Checklist
./changelog/fragments
using the changelog toolRelated issues
This is an automatic backport of pull request #6058 done by [Mergify](https://mergify.com).