Looking at perf:
0.21 │ push %rbp
0.99 │ mov %rsp,%rbp
│ push %r15
0.25 │ push %r14
│ push %r13
0.49 │ push %r12
0.66 │ push %rbx
1.23 │ lea -0x10000(%rsp),%r11
0.23 │ 15: sub $0x1000,%rsp
1.01 │ orq $0x0,(%rsp)
59.12 │ cmp %r11,%rsp
0.27 │ ↑ jne 15
Seems like 64K is too much to have on the stack for each invocation, considering
that only a minuscule number of allocations are actually larger than 4K.
There's actually no good reason this function should use so much stack space. Or
use small_string at all. Everything can be done in small chunks that don't require
any memory allocations and use up 2K bytes on the stack.
This patch also adds a microbenchmark for tracking the unparsing performance. Here
are the results for this change:
(Before)
BM_UnparseRealDerivationFile/hello 7275 ns 7247 ns 96093 bytes_per_second=232.136Mi/s
BM_UnparseRealDerivationFile/firefox 40538 ns 40376 ns 17327 bytes_per_second=378.534Mi/s
(After)
BM_UnparseRealDerivationFile/hello 3228 ns 3218 ns 215671 bytes_per_second=522.775Mi/s
BM_UnparseRealDerivationFile/firefox 39724 ns 39584 ns 17617 bytes_per_second=386.101Mi/s
This translates into nice evaluation performance improvements (compared to 18c3d2348f):
Benchmark 1: GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE=8G old-nix/bin/nix-instantiate ../nixpkgs -A nixosTests.gnome --readonly-mode
Time (mean ± σ): 3.111 s ± 0.021 s [User: 2.513 s, System: 0.580 s]
Range (min … max): 3.083 s … 3.143 s 10 runs
Benchmark 2: GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE=8G result/bin/nix-instantiate ../nixpkgs -A nixosTests.gnome --readonly-mode
Time (mean ± σ): 3.037 s ± 0.038 s [User: 2.461 s, System: 0.558 s]
Range (min … max): 2.960 s … 3.086 s 10 runs
This changes our GHA CI and nix-store-tests packaging
to build and run the benchmarks. This does not affect
the default packaging - the overrides apply only for the
GHA CI.
