constructing an ostringstream for non-string concats (like integer addition) is
a small constant cost that we can avoid. for string concats we can keep all the
string temporaries we get from coerceToString and concatenate them in one go,
which saves a lot of intermediate temporaries and copies in ostringstream. we
can also avoid copying the concatenated string again by directly allocating it
in GC memory and moving ownership of the concatenated string into the target
value.
saves about 2% on system eval.
before:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 2.837 s ± 0.031 s [User: 2.562 s, System: 0.191 s]
Range (min … max): 2.796 s … 2.892 s 20 runs
after:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 2.790 s ± 0.035 s [User: 2.532 s, System: 0.187 s]
Range (min … max): 2.722 s … 2.836 s 20 runs
we don't have to create an ostream sentry object for every character of a JSON
string we write. format a bunch of characters and flush them to the stream all
at once instead.
this doesn't affect small numbers of string characters, but larger numbers of
total JSON string characters written gain a lot. at 1MB of total string written
we gain almost 30%, at 16MB it's almost a factor of 3x. large numbers of JSON
string characters do occur naturally in a nixos system evaluation to generate
documentation (though this is now somewhat mitigated by caching the largest part
of nixos option docs).
benchmarked with
hyperfine 'nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) {e})"' --warmup 1 -L e 1,4,256,4096,65536
before:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 1)"
Time (mean ± σ): 12.5 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 9.2 ms, System: 4.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 11.9 ms … 13.1 ms 223 runs
Benchmark 2: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 4)"
Time (mean ± σ): 12.5 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 9.3 ms, System: 3.8 ms]
Range (min … max): 11.9 ms … 13.2 ms 220 runs
Benchmark 3: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 256)"
Time (mean ± σ): 13.2 ms ± 0.3 ms [User: 9.8 ms, System: 4.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 12.6 ms … 14.3 ms 205 runs
Benchmark 4: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 4096)"
Time (mean ± σ): 24.0 ms ± 0.4 ms [User: 19.4 ms, System: 5.2 ms]
Range (min … max): 22.7 ms … 25.8 ms 119 runs
Benchmark 5: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 65536)"
Time (mean ± σ): 196.0 ms ± 3.7 ms [User: 171.2 ms, System: 25.8 ms]
Range (min … max): 190.6 ms … 201.5 ms 14 runs
after:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 1)"
Time (mean ± σ): 12.4 ms ± 0.3 ms [User: 9.1 ms, System: 4.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 11.7 ms … 13.3 ms 204 runs
Benchmark 2: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 4)"
Time (mean ± σ): 12.4 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 9.2 ms, System: 3.9 ms]
Range (min … max): 11.8 ms … 13.0 ms 214 runs
Benchmark 3: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 256)"
Time (mean ± σ): 12.6 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 9.5 ms, System: 3.8 ms]
Range (min … max): 12.1 ms … 13.3 ms 209 runs
Benchmark 4: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 4096)"
Time (mean ± σ): 15.9 ms ± 0.2 ms [User: 11.4 ms, System: 5.1 ms]
Range (min … max): 15.2 ms … 16.4 ms 171 runs
Benchmark 5: nix eval --raw --expr "let s = __concatStringsSep \"\" (__genList (_: \"c\") 256); in __toJSON (__genList (_: s) 65536)"
Time (mean ± σ): 69.0 ms ± 0.9 ms [User: 44.3 ms, System: 25.3 ms]
Range (min … max): 67.2 ms … 70.9 ms 42 runs
Previously you had to remember to call value->attrs->sort() after
populating value->attrs. Now there is a BindingsBuilder helper that
wraps Bindings and ensures that sort() is called before you can use
it.
nixpkgs can save a good bit of eval memory with this primop. zipAttrsWith is
used quite a bit around nixpkgs (eg in the form of recursiveUpdate), but the
most costly application for this primop is in the module system. it improves
the implementation of zipAttrsWith from nixpkgs by not checking an attribute
multiple times if it occurs more than once in the input list, allocates less
values and set elements, and just avoids many a temporary object in general.
nixpkgs has a more generic version of this operation, zipAttrsWithNames, but
this version is only used once so isn't suitable for being the base of a new
primop. if it were to be used more we should add a second primop instead.
When we check for disappeared overrides, we can get "false positives"
for follows and overrides which are defined in the dependencies of the
flake we are locking, since they are not parsed by
parseFlakeInputs. However, at that point we already know that the
overrides couldn't have possible been changed if the input itself
hasn't changed (since we check that oldLock->originalRef == *input.ref
for the input's parent). So, to prevent this, only perform this check
when it was possible that the flake changed (e.g. the flake we're
locking, or a new input, or the input has changed and mustRefetch ==
true).
This makes sure that values parsed from TOML have a proper size. Using
e.g. `double` caused issues on i686 where the size of `double` (32bit)
was too small to accommodate some values.
This was already accidentally disabled in ba87b08. It also no longer
appears to be beneficial, and in fact slow things down, e.g. when
evaluating a NixOS system configuration:
elapsed time: median = 3.8170 mean = 3.8202 stddev = 0.0195 min = 3.7894 max = 3.8600 [rejected, p=0.00000, Δ=0.36929±0.02513]
calling GC_malloc for each value is significantly more expensive than
allocating a bunch of values at once with GC_malloc_many. "a bunch" here
is a GC block size, ie 16KiB or less.
this gives a 1.5% performance boost when evaluating our nixos system.
tested with
nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
# on master
Time (mean ± σ): 3.335 s ± 0.007 s [User: 2.774 s, System: 0.293 s]
Range (min … max): 3.315 s … 3.347 s 50 runs
# with this change
Time (mean ± σ): 3.288 s ± 0.006 s [User: 2.728 s, System: 0.292 s]
Range (min … max): 3.274 s … 3.307 s 50 runs
