The store parameter "write-nar-listing=1" will cause BinaryCacheStore
to write a file ‘<store-hash>.ls.xz’ for each ‘<store-hash>.narinfo’
added to the binary cache. This file contains an XZ-compressed JSON
file describing the contents of the NAR, excluding the contents of
regular files.
E.g.
{
"version": 1,
"root": {
"type": "directory",
"entries": {
"lib": {
"type": "directory",
"entries": {
"Mcrt1.o": {
"type": "regular",
"size": 1288
},
"Scrt1.o": {
"type": "regular",
"size": 3920
},
}
}
}
...
}
}
(The actual file has no indentation.)
This is intended to speed up the NixOS channels programs index
generator [1], since fetching gazillions of large NARs from
cache.nixos.org is currently a bottleneck for updating the regular
(non-small) channel.
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-channel-scripts/blob/master/generate-programs-index.cc
The fact that queryPathInfo() is synchronous meant that we needed a
thread for every concurrent binary cache lookup, even though they end
up being handled by the same download thread. Requiring hundreds of
threads is not a good idea. So now there is an asynchronous version of
queryPathInfo() that takes a callback function to process the
result. Similarly, enqueueDownload() now takes a callback rather than
returning a future.
Thus, a command like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org/ -r /nix/store/slljrzwmpygy1daay14kjszsr9xix063-nixos-16.09beta231.dccf8c5
that returns 4941 paths now takes 1.87s using only 2 threads (the main
thread and the downloader thread). (This is with a prewarmed
CloudFront.)
Caching path info is generally useful. For instance, it speeds up "nix
path-info -rS /run/current-system" (i.e. showing the closure sizes of
all paths in the closure of the current system) from 5.6s to 0.15s.
This also eliminates some APIs like Store::queryDeriver() and
Store::queryReferences().
This enables an optimisation in hydra-queue-runner, preventing a
download of a NAR it just uploaded to the cache when reading files
like hydra-build-products.
