During garbage collection we cache several things -- a set of known-dead
paths, a set of known-alive paths, and a map of paths to their derivers.
Currently they use STL maps and sets, which are ordered structures that
typically are backed by binary trees. Since we are putting pseudorandom
paths into these and looking them up by exact key, we don't need the
ordering, and we're paying a nontrivial cost per insertion.
The existing maps require O(n log n) memory and have O(log n) insertion
and lookup time.
We could instead use unordered maps, which are typically backed by
hashmaps. These require O(n) memory and have O(1) insertion and lookup
time.
On my system this appears to result in a dramatic speedup -- prior to
this patch I was able to delete 400k paths out of 9.5 million over the
course of 34.5 hours. After this patch the same result took 89 minutes.
This result should NOT be taken at face value because the two runs
aren't really comparable; in particular the first started when I had 9.5
million store paths and the seconcd started with 7.8 million, so we are
deleting a different set of paths starting from a much cleaner
filesystem. But I do think it's indicative.
Related: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/9581
Commands like `nix flake metadata '.?submodules=1'` ignored the query
part of the URL, while `nix build '.?submodules=1#foo'` did work
correctly because of the presence of the fragment part.
The current instructions for building the Nix manual include a command that doesn't work as described. Specifically:
```
nix build .#nix^doc
```
Running this command results in the error:
```
error: derivation '/nix/store/hddqxzfqgx2fhj8q66ss3idym7pk7aj1-nix-2.26.0pre20250107_383ab87.drv' does not have wanted outputs 'doc'
```
However, this command works if you specify the Nix version explicitly, such as:
```
nix build nix/2.24.11#nix^doc
```
Additionally, these commands are run within the Nix root directory.
However, the nix build .#nix^doc command does work when run from the nixpkgs directory and generates the NixOS manual.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something. Is the `nix^doc` supposed to be added somehow to flake outputs?
The incremental build section does not work since as make has been decommissioned in favor of Meson. Should this be simply deleted?
I'd messed up a rebase in my previous iteration, causing `weakly_canonical` to reappear,
but not trigger a test failure.
These two functions behave similarly when the argument is a path that points to a broken
symlink. `weakly_canonical` would not resolve it because the target doesn't exist, and
`makeParentCanonical` would not resolve it, because it never resolves the final path
element.
This new test case now also tests a valid symlink, "differentiating" the two.
The experimental `nix eval` command already supports a `--raw` flag.
This commit implements the same flag for the stable nix-instantiate command.
Until now instructions and scripts that didn't want to rely on experimental
features had to use workarounds such as:
nix-instantiate --eval <something> | tr -d \"
(which also undesirably also removes double quotation marks within the string), or
nix-instantiate --eval <something> | jq -j
(which undesirably depends on another package).
Co-authored-by: Silvan Mosberger <silvan.mosberger@tweag.io>
