When using a binary cache store, the queue runner receives NARs from
the build machines, compresses them, and uploads them to the
cache. However, keeping multiple large NARs in memory can cause the
queue runner to run out of memory. This can happen for instance when
it's processing multiple ISO images concurrently.
The fix is to use a TokenServer to prevent the builder threads to
store more than a certain total size of NARs concurrently (at the
moment, this is hard-coded at 4 GiB). Builder threads that cause the
limit to be exceeded will block until other threads have finished.
The 4 GiB limit does not include certain other allocations, such as
for xz compression or for FSAccessor::readFile(). But since these are
unlikely to be more than the size of the NARs and hydra.nixos.org has
32 GiB RAM, it should be fine.
It's easier for the Hydra provisioner to put host public keys in the
machines file than to separately manage the known_hosts file
(especially when the provisioner runs on a different machine).
This prevents a race where multiple threads see that machine X is
missing path P, and start sending it concurrently. Nix handles this
correctly, but it's still wasteful (especially for the case where P ==
GHC).
A more refined scheme would be to have per machine, per path locks.
Having a hundred threads doing I/O at the same time is bad on magnetic
disks because of the excessive disk seeks. So allow only 4 threads to
copy closures in parallel.
Aborted builds are now put back on the runnable queue and retried
after a certain time interval (currently 60 seconds for the first
retry, then tripled on each subsequent retry).
This removes the need for Nix's build-remote.pl.
Build logs are now written to $HYDRA_DATA/build-logs because
hydra-queue-runner doesn't have write permission to /nix/var/log.