Re: guix package is slow

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hello!

swedebugia@riseup.net writes:

> Hi
>
> I would like guix package -A/s to be faster.
> There it takes >3s every time I run the command.

I agree that Guix is rather slow when comparing it to traditional
package managers such as apt; I think the main reason, as you found, is
that it has to load all the byte-compiled package definition files.

> Would it be possible to populate an index or something when pulling so
> that we have the information in a sqlite-db instead of traversing 40
> go-files with guile?

I remember asking Ludovic in #guix if Guile would be able to compete
with database software in terms of performance, and he said there are
ways we can make it faster. I'm not very knowledgeable myself about
Guile but if we could make it support static linking, to load only one
binary rather than hundreds in the case of Guix, that would be one way
to speed things. Next thing might be to implement native compilation.

> On an older guixsd with about 4k packages the delay was noticeably
> shorter. 

I guess the time it takes grows linearly (I hope!) with the number of
packages/modules it has to load. We're now at double that amount of
packages (IIRC), so Guix might take double the time it used to.

> What do you think?

Note that if you are using emacs-guix, the packages are kept in memory
so the operations there are much faster than when using the CLI.

Using an external databases to speed Guix is an interesting idea, but Id
rather have a lightning fast Guile in the longer term :)

Maxim