Sergei Trofimovich
edfc5b2f12
For a typical desktop system (~2K packages) we can easily get 100K
entries in RealisationsRefs. Without indices query for RealisationsRefs
requires linear scan.
RealisationsRefs(referrer)
--------------------------
Inefficiency is seen as a 100% CPU load of nix-daemon for the following
scenario:
$ nix edit -f . bash # add unused environment variable, like FOO="1"
# populate RealisationsRefs, build fresh system
$ nix build -f nixos system --arg config '{ contentAddressedByDefault = true; }'
$ nix edit -f . bash # add unused environment variable, like FOO="2"
$ time nix build -f nixos system --arg config '{ contentAddressedByDefault = true; }'
In this case `bash `will be rebuilt a few times and then rest of CPU
time is spent on scanning RealisationsRefs table (about 5 CPU-minutes
on my machine).
Before the change:
$ time nix build -f nixos system ... # step 4 above
real 34m3,613s
user 0m5,232s
sys 0m0,758s
Of all this time about 29.5 minutes are taken by nix-daemon's CPU time.
After the change:
$ time nix build -f nixos system ... # step 4 above
real 4m50,061s
user 0m5,038s
sys 0m0,677s
Of all this time about 1 minute is taken by nix-daemon's CPU time.
Most of the time is spent polling for non-existent realisations on
cache-nixos.org.
Realisations(outputPath)
------------------------
After running CA system for two weeks I got ~1M entries in Realisations
table. `nix-collect-garbage` became very slow (seemingly 100 path deletions
per second). It happens due to a slow cascading delete from Realisations
triggered by deletion from ValidPaths.
The fix is to add an index on primary key from ValidPaths(id) that
triggers cascading deletions.
Before the change:
$ time nix-collect-garbage -d --max-freed 100G
<interrupted before finish, took too long>
real 23m32.411s
user 17m49.679s
sys 4m50.609s
Most of time was spent in re-scanning Realisations table on each path deletion.
After the change:
$ time nix-collect-garbage -d --max-freed 100G
real 8m43.226s
user 6m16.317s
sys 1m40.188s
Time is spent scanning sqlite indices and in kernel when unlinking directories.
Nix
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. Please refer to the Nix manual for more details.
Installation
On Linux and macOS the easiest way to install Nix is to run the following shell command (as a user other than root):
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
Information on additional installation methods is available on the Nix download page.
Building And Developing
See our Hacking guide in our manual for instruction on how to build nix from source with nix-build or how to get a development environment.
Additional Resources
- Nix manual
- Nix jobsets on hydra.nixos.org
- NixOS Discourse
- Matrix - #nix:nixos.org
- IRC - #nixos on libera.chat
License
Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1.