tl;dr: With this 1 line change I was able to get a speedup of 1.5x on 1Gbit/s
wan connections by enabling zstd compression in nginx.
Also nix already supported all common compression format for http
transfer, webservers usually only enable them if they are advertised
through the Accept-Encoding header.
This pull requests makes nix advertises content compression support for
zstd, br, gzip and deflate.
It's particular useful to add transparent compression for binary caches
that serve packages from the host nix store in particular nix-serve,
nix-serve-ng and harmonia.
I tried so far gzip, brotli and zstd, whereas only zstd was able to bring
me performance improvements for 1Gbit/s WAN connections.
The following nginx configuration was used in combination with the
[zstd module](https://github.com/tokers/zstd-nginx-module) and
[harmonia](https://github.com/nix-community/harmonia/)
```nix
{
services.nginx.virtualHosts."cache.yourhost.com" = {
locations."/".extraConfig = ''
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5000;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_redirect http:// https://;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
zstd on;
zstd_types application/x-nix-archive;
'';
};
}
```
For testing I unpacked a linux kernel tarball to the nix store using
this command `nix-prefetch-url --unpack https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.8.tar.gz`.
Before:
```console
$ nix build && rm -rf /tmp/hello && time ./result/bin/nix copy --no-check-sigs --from https://cache.thalheim.io --to 'file:///tmp/hello?compression=none' '/nix/store/j42mahch5f0jvfmayhzwbb88sw36fvah-linux-6.1.8.tar.gz'
warning: Git tree '/scratch/joerg/nix' is dirty
real 0m18,375s
user 0m2,889s
sys 0m1,558s
```
After:
```console
$ nix build && rm -rf /tmp/hello && time ./result/bin/nix copy --no-check-sigs --from https://cache.thalheim.io --to 'file:///tmp/hello?compression=none' '/nix/store/j42mahch5f0jvfmayhzwb
b88sw36fvah-linux-6.1.8.tar.gz'
real 0m11,884s
user 0m4,130s
sys 0m1,439s
```
Signed-off-by: Jörg Thalheim <joerg@thalheim.io>
Update src/libstore/filetransfer.cc
Co-authored-by: Théophane Hufschmitt <7226587+thufschmitt@users.noreply.github.com>
If we don't have any github token, we won't be able to fetch private
repos, but we are also more likely to run into API limits since
we don't have a token. To mitigate this only ever use the github api
if we actually have a token.
This is important when using tooling like BEAR to generate
compilation database since the used glibc version needs to match
for LD_PRELOAD to work. It might be also beneficial when building
on systems other than NixOS with nix develop since /bin/sh might
be not bash (which is what all nix devs use for testing).
This fix is not perfect because Makefile.config.in itself is
also build with make but strictly better than the status quo.
By default Nix/NixOS already set a reasonable default `max-jobs = auto`
so we don't need to mention it in this tutorial.
The option is still documented in other parts of the documentation
if users ever stumble over this.
Fixes https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2531
- result list will be always empty if --json is passed
- for scripts an empty search result is not really an error,
we rather want to distinguish between evaluation errors and empty results