even though that according to that FAQ dpkg can be slow, in my
experience it wasn't too bad. Also, having to investigate store
corruption and how to fix it is a form of slowness, especially when it
fails or you don't have the technical expertise and consequentially you
need to reinstall (losing old non-back-upped work).
'sync' seems relatively inexpensive to me, compared to the time required
for building a package and even more inexpensive compared to the cost of
debugging store corruption:
antipode@antipode ~$ time sync
real 0m0,230s
user 0m0,004s
sys 0m0,047s
antipode@antipode ~$
antipode@antipode ~$ time sync
real 0m0,045s
user 0m0,003s
sys 0m0,014s
antipode@antipode ~$ time sync
real 0m0,044s
user 0m0,004s
sys 0m0,012s
Or, after a download:
$ time "guix build download"
real 0m50,681s
user 0m3,856s
sys 0m0,198s
$ sync
# I forgot to properly time this one, but < 0.5 sec
# Don't have numbers on the time required for debugging corruption.
(On a SSD)
Also, the situation is unlike 55707 -- we don't need to call 'fsync' or
'sync' after building each store item or writing each line of a store
item file, we only need to do it before registering it in the database
and returning it to the user -- in some sense, the 'fsync' can be done
sort-of asynchronuously.
For example, if "guix build" asks for foo.drv is built, and it depends
on bar.drv and baz.drv, then the daemon can build bar.drv, baz.drv and
'foo.drv' (without registering or fsyncing or registering in the database).
Once all the things are built, the daemon could then fsync the things,
and after the fsyncing completes, register things in the database -- on
the speed, I would like to note that:
(*) if the store items that were made were small, then fsync'ing them
should be pretty fast, as there isn't much to sync (at least in
theory, I think I read about some limitation in the ext3
implementation where 'fsync' is essentially 'sync' or something
like that? Don't know if that's still the case, though.)
(*) if the store items were sufficiently large (say, a bunch more than
Linux is willing to buffer), then at some point Linux will have
flushed most of them anyway. I don't have a clue what heuristics
it uses though (except for 'no more than there is free RAM :p)').
(*) In theory, if a file is already written to disk (implicitly as
part of some heuristic, or by an explicit 'fsync'), 'fsync'
should be about zero cost. Also, for a reasonable implementation
of 'fsync', I would expect the OS to take the opportunity to
write some other files as well (if the disk is seeking anyways,
it might might as well write some stuff while it's moving
to the right position and such).
(This requires changes to the daemon of course).
Another difference with 55707, is that the write/fsync pattern is very
different -- in 55707, it's like
write a small line (after waiting for the previous fsync to complete)
fsync the file
repeat very often
whereas with 'recursive fsync before registering (without other
changes)', it's like
write files (number and size varies)
recursive fsync the store item (note: as written elsewhere, the cost
of a recursive fsync should in theory be a lot less than the sum of the
fsync cost of an individual file, as the kernel likely takes the
opportunity to write some other stuff anyways)
wait for fsync to complete
repeat for the next store item (much less frequent than the previous
case (*))
and with 'recursive fsync before registering, and delay the registering
where possible':
write files for a store item
repeat for other store items
fsync the new files (good chance they were flushed to disk already
when the store items are large)
wait for fsync to complete
repeat with next call to "guix build" / "guix shell" ...
-- there should be much less frequent 'fsync' than in 55707, and the
'fsyncs' that are done would be mostly batched.
(*) I'm not considering things like the 'can compute derivation' linter
-- that linter would be in theory slowed down a lot, but I don't see a
reason why that linter would need a daemon to talk too.
Summarised, the main two points are that:
* the fsync can be delayed for a while
* there's a good chance that delayed fsyncs are done automatically
by the kernel in the background (making the explicit 'fsync'
of later mostly free)
* the total time for doing multiple fsyncs should be much less
than the sum of the times of doing individual fsyncs
(This is currently all theoretical)
Greetings,
Maxime.
