Re: guix package --search slow ?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi zimoun,

zimoun <address@hidden> skribis:

> Your machine is probably faster than mine ;-)

For the record, commit 94aeec0aef03ab44e41bfc3e77c3b623cb3d607c, shortly
before 1.0, make ‘guix search’ faster (as in less CPU usage.)

>  $ time guix package --search=numpy
> real    0m7.353s
> user    0m1.256s
> sys     0m0.136s
>
> $  time guix package --search=conduit
> real    0m0.728s
> user    0m0.764s
> sys     0m0.044s
>
> compared to Debian `aptitude` for example:
>
>  $ time aptitude search numpy
> real    0m3.513s
> user    0m0.692s
> sys     0m0.092s
>
>  $ time aptitude search conduit
> real    0m0.622s
> user    0m0.540s
> sys     0m0.048s

The cold-cache timings are worse for Guix, which ends up doing a lot of
I/O to traverse all these .scm files; APT only has to go through a
couple of files I guess.

The warm-cache timings are comparable though, which I think is good.
:-)

We could probably improve the cold-cache timings by adding synopses and
descriptions to the package cache that ‘guix pull’ builds in
~/.config/guix/current/lib/guix/package.cache, but that would also make
that cache bigger.  Not sure if it’s worth it.

Thanks,
Ludo’.