When the maximum memory size is chosen too large (relative to the free memory
usage), so that the evaluation workers don't fit into the free memory, they
will start being swapped out. Further increase in memory usage will not be
reflected in the RSS, so they will not exit, and instead fill up all swap too
until the system runs out of memory.
The BDW-GC keeps track of its heap size, including any parts of it that may be
swapped out. For this reason it does not suffer from a similar problem. While
not all memory usage by the evaluation worker is accounted for by the GC, a
simple affine model for the overhead works reasonably well in practice. The
specific parameter values were determined using nixpkgs evaluation, and appear
to work quite well also for somewhat different workloads (like the `hydraJobs`
of Lix, which include a bunch of NixOS system configurations). So this is what
gets used.
When Lix is configured without the BDW-GC, of course this approach cannot be
used. In this case the old strategy is retained.
Change-Id: I6cb5f0a9b4ceda9dd14be165dda108cd6a6a6964
Alois Wohlschlager
ac8209404c