lix/src/libstore
Eelco Dolstra 11800e6198 download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files
Getting substitute information using the binary cache substituter has
non-trivial latency overhead.  A package or NixOS system configuration
can have hundreds of dependencies, and in the worst case (when the
local info cache is empty) we have to do a separate HTTP request for
each of these.  If the ping time to the server is t, getting N info
files will take tN seconds; e.g., with a ping time of 0.1s to
nixos.org, sequentially downloading 1000 info files (a typical NixOS
config) will take at least 100 seconds.

To fix this problem, the binary cache substituter can now perform
requests in parallel.  This required changing the substituter
interface to support a function querySubstitutablePathInfos() that
queries multiple paths at the same time, and rewriting queryMissing()
to take advantage of parallelism.  (Due to local caching,
parallelising queryMissing() is sufficient for most use cases, since
it's almost always called before building a derivation and thus fills
the local info cache.)

For example, parallelism speeds up querying all 1056 paths in a
particular NixOS system configuration from 116s to 2.6s.  It works so
well because the eccentricity of the top-level derivation in the
dependency graph is only 9.  So we only need 10 round-trips (when
using an unlimited number of parallel connections) to get everything.

Currently we do a maximum of 150 parallel connections to the server.
Thus it's important that the binary cache server (e.g. nixos.org) has
a high connection limit.  Alternatively we could use HTTP pipelining,
but WWW::Curl doesn't support it and libcurl has a hard-coded limit of
5 requests per pipeline.
2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
..
build.cc download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
derivations.cc * Ouch. A store upgrade could cause a substituter to be triggered, 2011-09-12 09:07:43 +00:00
derivations.hh * Eliminate all uses of the global variable ‘store’ from libstore. 2011-08-31 21:11:50 +00:00
gc.cc Fix obscure race condition in GC root creation 2012-04-16 18:47:01 +02:00
globals.cc download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
globals.hh * Move initialisation of variables like nixConfDir from libmain to 2011-11-22 17:28:41 +00:00
local-store.cc download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
local-store.hh download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
Makefile.am Compress build logs on the fly using bzip2 2012-05-30 10:12:29 -04:00
misc.cc download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
misc.hh * Eliminate all uses of the global variable ‘store’ from libstore. 2011-08-31 21:11:50 +00:00
optimise-store.cc On Linux, make the Nix store really read-only by using the immutable bit 2012-02-15 01:31:56 +01:00
pathlocks.cc Set the close-on-exec flag on file descriptors 2012-03-05 20:29:00 +01:00
pathlocks.hh * Revert r19797, and use a simpler solution: just don't monitor build 2010-02-03 21:38:41 +00:00
references.cc Use data() instead of c_str() where appropriate 2012-02-09 18:27:45 +01:00
references.hh * Store the size of a store path in the database (to be precise, the 2010-11-16 17:11:46 +00:00
remote-store.cc download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
remote-store.hh download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
schema.sql * Store the size of a store path in the database (to be precise, the 2010-11-16 17:11:46 +00:00
store-api.cc Reserve some disk space for the garbage collector 2012-05-29 22:59:12 -04:00
store-api.hh download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files 2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
worker-protocol.hh nix-store -r: do substitutions in parallel 2012-06-27 16:58:15 -04:00