Hi Ludo, >> A more fundamental question is whether I will be able to do useful work >> with this setup. It is well known that host file access from Docker on >> macOS is slow, but I didn't realize how slow it is until I compiled Guix >> in... four hours. On the same machine booted to Linux, it's about 40 >> minutes. > > Ouch. Is this a fact of life or are there special settings that could > make it less slow?
Docker for macOS has some options that use caching for more efficient host filesystem access, but they come with restrictions, in particular file changes on one side not being propagated immediately to the other side. > Five seconds to spawn a process is already relatively long; we could > increase it a little, but the slowness here is a concern. Whereas the problems with file access are known and understood (ultimately it is the important differences in low-level file handling between Linux and macOS), I have no idea why the startup time for these daemons is so high. There is no significant CPU performance overhead when running Guix in Docker, nor do the daemons require any access to files managed by macOS. Konrad.
