Re: File search progress: database review and question on triggers

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> 3. Size of the database:
>    I've persisted all locally-present store items for my current Guix version
>    and it produced a database of 72 MiB.  It compresses down to 8 MiB
>    in zstd.

For comparison, my laptop’s store contains 1,103,543 files, excluding
.links 691,994.  The updatedb database for all of them is 86MB and takes
~6 seconds to generate:

    time updatedb \
         --localpaths=/gnu/store \
         --findoptions='( -path /gnu/store/.links -o -name *.drv -o -name 
*.chroot ) -prune -o -type f -print' \
         --output=/tmp/dbfile

    locate -d /tmp/dbfile ecxc0800

(This could be further tweaked to exclude links…)

>    The worse case is around (number of guix generations) x ~100 MiB.

This seems a little excessive.

> 4. Indexing speed:
>    The above items took some 20 minutes to complete (on my rather
>    powerful machine).

Oof.  The updatedb hack above takes 6 seconds on my i7-6500U CPU @
2.50GHz with SSD.

I’m not suggesting to use updatedb, but I think it can be instructive to
look at how the file database is implemented there.  We don’t have to
use SQlite if it is much slower and heavier than a custom inverted
index.

-- 
Ricardo