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.
Sergei Trofimovich
edfc5b2f12