Hi Guix! Consider these two files:
https://ci.guix.gnu.org/nar/gzip/kfcrrl6p6f6v51jg5rirmq3q067zxih6-ungoogled-chromium-87.0.4280.88-0.b78cb92 https://ci.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/kfcrrl6p6f6v51jg5rirmq3q067zxih6-ungoogled-chromium-87.0.4280.88-0.b78cb92 Quick decompression bench: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- $ du -h /tmp/uc.nar.[gl]z 103M /tmp/uc.nar.gz 71M /tmp/uc.nar.lz $ gunzip -c < /tmp/uc.nar.gz| wc -c 350491552 $ time lzip -d </tmp/uc.nar.lz >/dev/null real 0m6.040s user 0m5.950s sys 0m0.036s $ time gunzip -c < /tmp/uc.nar.gz >/dev/null real 0m2.009s user 0m1.977s sys 0m0.032s --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- The decompression throughput (compressed bytes read in the first column, uncompressed bytes written in the second column) is: input | output gzip: 167 MiB/s | 52 MB/s lzip: 56 MiB/s | 11 MB/s Indeed, if you run this from a computer on your LAN: wget -O - … | gunzip > /dev/null you’ll find that wget caps at 50 M/s with gunzip, whereas with lunzip it caps at 11 MB/s. >From my place I get a peak download bandwidth of 30+ MB/s from ci.guix.gnu.org, thus substitute downloads are CPU-bound (I can’t go beyond 11 M/s due to decompression). I must say it never occurred to me it could be the case when we introduced lzip substitutes. I’d get faster substitute downloads with gzip (I would download more but the time-to-disk would be smaller.) Specifically, download + decompression of ungoogled-chromium from the LAN completes in 2.4s for gzip vs. 7.1s for lzip. On a low-end ARMv7 device, also on the LAN, I get 32s (gzip) vs. 53s (lzip). Where to go from here? Several options: 0. Lzip decompression speed increases with compression ratio, but we’re already using ‘--best’ on ci. The only way we could gain is by using “multi-member archives” and then parallel decompression as done in plzip, but that’s probably not supported in lzlib. So we’re probably stuck here. 1. Since ci.guix.gnu.org still provides both gzip and lzip archives, ‘guix substitute’ could automatically pick one or the other depending on the CPU and bandwidth. Perhaps a simple trick would be to check the user/wall-clock time ratio and switch to gzip for subsequent downloads if that ratio is close to one. How well would that work? 2. Use Zstd like all the cool kids since it seems to have a much higher decompression speed: <https://facebook.github.io/zstd/>. 630 MB/s on ungoogled-chromium on my laptop. Woow. 3. Allow for parallel downloads (really: parallel decompression) as Julien did in <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/39728>. My preference would be #2, #1, and #3, in this order. #2 is great but it’s quite a bit of work, whereas #1 could be deployed quickly. I’m not fond of #3 because it just papers over the underlying issue and could be counterproductive if the number of jobs is wrong. Thoughts? Ludo’.
