Re: guix pull timing out on low resource servers

[Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com>]

On Mon 15 May 2017 12:12, ng0 <ng0@pragmatique.xyz> writes:

> Since the switch to Guile 2.2 and guix pull taking much more
> computing time and resources, all my virtual hosting servers
> time out when I run guix pull on them without using mosh
> and just openssh, because the process just takes much too
> long.
>
> I doubt I'm the only one who experiences this, and just
> increasing the server specs for this process is pointless
> for what they run.
> It's even worse than that, in the future there will be just
> one DNS server running GuixSD, this requires minimal resources.
> Should I just never update these devices or "just get a real
> server"?

I have the smallest DigitalOcean droplet size with a swap partition, and
things work for me I think.  Takes a while though.

There will always be some machines that won't be able to "guix pull"
because of resource constraints.  But I think they are in a minority and
they don't include e.g. the smallest DigitalOcean droplets.

In the meantime we need to rework "build-all.scm" I think to not incur
an O(N) memory usage in the size of the guix package set by
topologically sorting the files (I know there are cycles, but the
general approach should improve things), and by forking off and
compiling the files in separate processes instead of doing everything
from one process (albeit with many threads).  Additionally there are
some compiler speedups in Guile to be had (notably the "basic register
allocation" task from
https://wingolog.org/archives/2016/02/04/guile-compiler-tasks).

And in the meantime-meantime, the workaround is to use a swap file that
is as large as necessary.

Andy