E.g.
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nars \
/nix/store/b0w2hafndl09h64fhb86kw6bmhbmnpm1-blender-2.79/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/blender.svg > /dev/null
real 0m4.139s
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nars \
/nix/store/b0w2hafndl09h64fhb86kw6bmhbmnpm1-blender-2.79/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/blender.svg > /dev/null
real 0m0.024s
(Before, the second call took ~0.220s.)
This will use a NAR listing in
/tmp/nars/b0w2hafndl09h64fhb86kw6bmhbmnpm1.ls containing all metadata,
including the offsets of regular files inside the NAR. Thus, we don't
need to read the entire NAR. (We do read the entire listing, but
that's generally pretty small. We could use a SQLite DB by borrowing
some more code from nixos-channel-scripts/file-cache.hh.)
This is primarily useful when Hydra is serving files from an S3 binary
cache, in particular when you have giant NARs. E.g. we had some 12 GiB
NARs, so accessing individuals files was pretty slow.
This speeds up commands like "nix cat-store". For example:
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nar-cache /nix/store/i60yncmq6w9dyv37zd2k454g0fkl3arl-systemd-234/etc/udev/udev.conf
real 0m4.336s
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nar-cache /nix/store/i60yncmq6w9dyv37zd2k454g0fkl3arl-systemd-234/etc/udev/udev.conf
real 0m0.045s
The primary motivation is to allow hydra-server to serve files from S3
binary caches. Previously Hydra had a hack to do "nix-store -r
<path>", but that fetches the entire closure so is prohibitively
expensive.
There is no garbage collection of the NAR cache yet. Also, the entire
NAR is read when accessing a single member file. We could generate the
NAR listing to provide random access.
Note: the NAR cache is indexed by the store path hash, not the content
hash, so NAR caches should not be shared between binary caches, unless
you're sure that all your builds are binary-reproducible.
Probably as a result of a bad merge in
4b8f1b0ec0, we had both a
BinaryCacheStoreAccessor and a
RemoteFSAccessor. BinaryCacheStore::getFSAccessor() returned the
latter, but BinaryCacheStore::addToStore() checked for the
former. This probably caused hydra-queue-runner to download paths that
it just uploaded.
