bug#35660: guix weather runaway memory consumption

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

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Hi Ludo,

On Mon, 13 May 2019 22:46:22 +0200
Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> I don’t think this is the place to debug personal package collections.
> :-)

I didn't even remember the personal package collection at first.
This here is a bug in guix that happens to manifest with that personal package
collection.

The failure mode here is very very bad.  Guix will consume all available
memory and then start on the swap, at which point the computer will
become unresponsive to any input and the user can't save any open
documents and has to kill the power to the computer.

After the user did that and restarted the computer, it will happen all
over again on the next "guix weather" (100% of the time).

> I’d love to give a hand but I feel we’re already overwhelmed with bugs
> related to things happening on ‘master’.
> 
> WDYT?

Oh, it's not time-critical at all for me.

I reported this bug for documentation--I already know how to work
around it.

Though there is a bug somewhere--it's not going to magically vanish.

But a user is going to encounter the same problem eventually, then not
reduce it to his GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH and give up.  

Furthermore, if he wanted to find out where exactly the problem is, he'd have
to delete files in $GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH one by one and invoke guix weather
in-between, each time crashing his entire computer after like 10 min per try.
That's not a good user experience.

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