Re: guix --container is RAM hungry

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

Hi Ludovic,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Edouard,
>
> Edouard Klein <edou@rdklein.fr> skribis:
>
>> I'm a huge fan of guix --container, and I created a system to use those
>> by default for network services. But the VPS these services run on has
>> only 2GB of RAM, and I just realized that a container, by default,
>> requires at least 200MB.
>
> Ouch, confirmed:
>
> $ \time -v guix shell -C coreutils -- uname 2>&1 |grep 'Maximum resident'
>         Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 283048
> $ \time -v guix shell coreutils -- uname 2>&1 |grep 'Maximum resident'
>         Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 56588
> $ guix describe
> Generation 297  Mar 24 2024 23:12:25    (current)
>   guix 28bc0e8
>     repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
>     branch: master
>     commit: 28bc0e870b4d48b8e3e773382bb0e999df2e3611
>
>
> As raingloom and Ricardo wrote, there’s a Guile process that keeps
> waiting.

Is there a technical reason for this?  Couldn't we replace the
current Guix process with 'exec', as hinted by Edouard?

If possible, that'd be the most direct way to avoid any of the memory
cost incurred by Guile/Guix.

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim