Eelco Dolstra
0629601da1
EvalState contains a few counters (e.g. nrValues) that increase quickly enough that they end up being interpreted as pointers by the garbage collector. Moving it to the heap makes them invisible to the garbage collector. This reduces the max RSS doing 100 evaluations of nixos.tests.firefox.x86_64-linux.drvPath from 455 MiB to 292 MiB. Note: ideally, allocations would be much further up in the 64-bit address space to reduce the odds of an integer being misinterpreted as a pointer. Maybe we can use some linker magic to move the .bss segment to a higher address.
Nix, the purely functional package manager
Nix is a new take on package management that is fairly unique. Because of its purity aspects, a lot of issues found in traditional package managers don't appear with Nix.
To find out more about the tool, usage and installation instructions, please read the manual, which is available on the Nix website at http://nixos.org/nix/manual.
Contributing
Take a look at the Hacking Section of the manual. It helps you to get started with building Nix from source.
License
Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1
This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit.