[Nix-dev] How do parallel builds scale?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

As part of Hubble, I ran a series of package build time measurements
using Nixpkgs with ‘enableParallelBuild = true’ on a 32-core machine of
a cluster at INRIA.  I recompiled ~800 derivations of Nixpkgs, with
‘build-cores’ in [1..32].  The results are summarized here:

  http://hubble.gforge.inria.fr/parallel-builds.html

Per-package details are at:

  http://hubble.gforge.inria.fr/parallel-build-details.html

In short, package build scale very poorly, and more than half of the
packages didn’t scale beyond 2.

The ‘build’ phase itself scales better, but for half of the packages the
speedup is lower than 4.

Thanks,
Ludo’.
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