Vagrant Cascadian <vagr...@debian.org> writes:
> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]] > On 2023-06-24, Nicolas Graves via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System > distribution." wrote: >> On 2023-06-24 13:08, Csepp wrote: >>> Nicolas Graves via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System >>> distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> writes: >>> IMHO LLMs for Guix are so damn not worth the effort. It will not fix >>> any of the actual issues with Guix, like the huge performance gap >>> between it and traditional package managers. >> >> I've also opened another discussion on the subject on guix-devel >> recently. Do you have any benchmark material to back this up? > > Well, I just ran "apt update" on Debian, and it took approximately 7 > seconds, which was mostly spent downloading moderately sized files from > Debian mirrors (~1MB). > > A corresponding "guix pull" took 299 seconds, downloading at least 8MB > (from a quick eyeball calculation as guix does not summarize the results > for me), and compiling all the various guix-*.drv that make up guix > pull. The vast majority of the time was spent compiling > derivations. This was also using a local copy of guix.git, so having to > update guix.git over the network would take even longer... (and it did > even spend a fair amount of time copying from the local guix.git on a > fast NVMe device) > > Obviously, guix pull is doing a lot more, but it is ... doing a lot > more! > > "apt install hello" (~2.3 seconds) and "guix install hello" (~1.5 > seconds) were actually in a similar ballpark, which honestly surprised > me. Guix is much faster with "guix remove hello" ... although arguably > "guix remove hello && guix gc --delete $(guix build hello)" would be a > more similar operation, and although I did not time it, it was > reasonably fast, too. > > So, presuming substitutes are available, the main slowness with guix > seems to be guix pull? NVMe (or even an SSD) helps a lot. And I suspect your system also has a good amount of RAM for IO caching and at least 4 modern 64 bit cores. Try running guix pull on a 32 bit machine with 1 GB of RAM and an HDD with LUKS for storage (and a lot of swap), you'll see a waaaay wider performance gap. Even simple operations like guix edit take much longer than they should. Yes, Guix does more, but a lot of what it does could be sped up.
