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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-7389?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17472605#comment-17472605
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Thomas Skjølberg commented on MNG-7389:
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The default Maven cache handling for two cloud CI providers (have not looked at
others) is suboptimal, so this kind of improvement captures a broad audience.
I've yet to see any project using the cache optimally, which is natural,
because it is in fact quite hard with the current tooling.
And I am all for investing in sufficient processing power, but one could argue
that it is rather the case that introducing more level 1 cache equivalents
(i.e. in the form of a colocated artifact store) is for the specialized segment
with the know-how and volume to justify the investment (servers cost more than
their yearly lease). Also, better cache management makes doing so less
important or even redundant from a performance standpoint.
Look, this is a real opportunity to reduce Maven "cost of ownership" and
improve perceived stability, even get a leg up on Gradle, which also lacks this
feature. The rise of free automatic dependency updates (via Renovate, Snyk,
etc) has been heating up CI pipelines and artifact stores like there is no
tomorrow; optimizing the cache use contributes towards keeping the cost of
having up-to-date and safe apps down.
> Incremental .m2 cache cleanup for CI
> ------------------------------------
>
> Key: MNG-7389
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-7389
> Project: Maven
> Issue Type: New Feature
> Components: Dependencies
> Reporter: Thomas Skjølberg
> Priority: Minor
>
> One or more popular continous integration are unable to properly manage the
> .m2 repository cache, resulting in wasted resources in the form of increased
> CI runtime and bandwidth consumption.
> *CircleCI cache behaviour:*
> - immutable cache entries
> - default behaviour is to wipe the cache each time a pom file is modified
> (i.e. using pom hash as a cache key)
> - cache entries TTL > weeks
> So CircleCI always has a cache containing only the necessary artifacts, but
> has to download all dependencies every time the pom file changes.
> *Github Actions cache behaviour*
> - (effectively) mutable cache entries
> - incremental cache (if it gets too big, it is wiped).
> - cache entries TTL 1 week
> So Github actions work well if the cache entries expire from time to time,
> otherwise the cache keeps growing.
> *Summary*
> Perhaps this does not look so bad at first glance, but for a project under
> active development, with a lot of artifacts, the pom file changes often. For
> example we have apps with 100 dependencies and automatic dependency bumping
> via Renovate, in addition to an hierarchy of libraries.
> Key takeaways; time is wasted
> - saving caches in CI
> - loading cache in CI
> - loading artifacts from external artifact store
> This happens quite a lot. From the artifact store perspective, this probably
> multiplies the load by a factor of 10.
> Possible solution: A way to define a "transaction" for artifact use, i.e.
> 1. run command to mark start of transaction
> 2. run one or more maven commands
> 3. run command to mark end of transaction, deleting artifacts not in use.
> For reference, Gradle has the same problem.
> Proof of concept:
> * CircleCI : [https://github.com/entur/maven-orb]
> * Github actions: [https://github.com/skjolber/tidy-cache-github-action]
> The implementation uses instrumentation to record artifact access, then
> delete the artifacts not recorded.
> *Alternatives:*
> I did try the last-accessed file timestamp first, turns out most CI
> filesystems are mounted without that option. However it should also be
> possible to update the modified timestamp and/or add read access to some
> existing metadata file.
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