Currently, the hydra.nixos.org queue contains 1000s of Darwin builds
that all depend on a stdenv-darwin that previously failed. However,
before, first createStep() would construct a dependency graph for each
build, then getQueuedBuilds() would discover that one of the steps had
failed previously and discard all those steps. Since the graph
construction involves a lot of uncached calls to isValidPath(), this
took several seconds per build.
Now createStep() detects the previous failure right away and bails
out.
These are build steps that remain "busy" in the database even though
they have finished, because they couldn't be updated (e.g. due to a
PostgreSQL connection problem). To prevent them from showing up as
busy in the "Machine status" page, we now periodically purge them.
Previously, if the queue monitor thread encounters a build that Hydra
has previously built, it downloaded the output paths from the binary
cache, just to determine the build products and metrics. This is very
inefficient. In particular, when doing something like merging
nixpkgs:staging into nixpkgs:master, the queue monitor thread will be
locked up for a long time fetching files from S3, causing the build
farm to be mostly idle.
Of course this is entirely unnecessary, since the build
products/metrics are already in the Hydra database. So now we just
look up a previous build with the same output path, and copy the
products/metrics.
The maximum output size per build step (as the sum of the NARs of each
output) can be set via hydra.conf, e.g.
max-output-size = 1000000000
The default is 2 GiB.
Also refactored the build error / status handling a bit.
When using a binary cache store, the queue runner receives NARs from
the build machines, compresses them, and uploads them to the
cache. However, keeping multiple large NARs in memory can cause the
queue runner to run out of memory. This can happen for instance when
it's processing multiple ISO images concurrently.
The fix is to use a TokenServer to prevent the builder threads to
store more than a certain total size of NARs concurrently (at the
moment, this is hard-coded at 4 GiB). Builder threads that cause the
limit to be exceeded will block until other threads have finished.
The 4 GiB limit does not include certain other allocations, such as
for xz compression or for FSAccessor::readFile(). But since these are
unlikely to be more than the size of the NARs and hydra.nixos.org has
32 GiB RAM, it should be fine.
Same problem as d744362e4a249a92ecfc3e48eae135e3a46db49e.
at /nix/store/ksvsbr7pg4z69bv6fbbc8h7x7rm2104m-gcc-4.9.3/include/c++/4.9.3/bits/predefined_ops.h:166
__last@entry=..., __comp=...) at /nix/store/ksvsbr7pg4z69bv6fbbc8h7x7rm2104m-gcc-4.9.3/include/c++/4.9.3/bits/stl_algo.h:1827
__comp=...) at /nix/store/ksvsbr7pg4z69bv6fbbc8h7x7rm2104m-gcc-4.9.3/include/c++/4.9.3/bits/stl_algo.h:4717
To use the local Nix store (default):
store_mode = direct
To use a local binary cache:
store_mode = local-binary-cache
binary_cache_dir = /var/lib/hydra/binary-cache
To use an S3 bucket:
store_mode = s3-binary-cache
binary_cache_s3_bucket = my-nix-bucket
Also, respect binary_cache_{secret,public}_key_file for signing the
binary cache.
