bug#27097: Performance on NFS

[Ludovic Courtès]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Roel Janssen <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

>> The reason we have /gnu NFS-mounted on the build node is that we can
>> then very easily replace the node when it would have a hardware failure,
>> without even losing the ability to run programs that were already
>> installed.
>
> That’s the same reason I have for keeping /gnu on NFS.  I have been
> experimenting with lsync (writing to local disks and then pushing
> changes asynchronously from local-gnu to remote-gnu), but I wasn’t
> convinced it would be reliable.
>
> I’m not sure if this would help, though, when the nodes keep mounting
> /gnu over NFS.

The nodes don’t do as much I/O the store as the daemon, so I think it
makes sense to use a local store for the node that runs guix-daemon.  In
general, Guix aside, building software on NFS is unavoidably slow.

> Is there a way to put /gnu on a Samba share instead?  I’d like to give
> that a try, but I’m not sure about what would happen to ownership and
> permissions (I don’t worry about hardlinks because I disabled
> deduplication).

I’m not sure if SMB is faster than NFS, is it?  9p (which Linux
supports) might work well.

Thanks,
Ludo’.