bug#48178: Out of memory error when generating a docker-image.

[Efraim Flashner]

On Mon, May 03, 2021 at 07:47:49PM +0200, Roel Janssen wrote:
> On Mon, 2021-05-03 at 12:39 -0400, Leo Famulari wrote:
> > On Mon, May 03, 2021 at 12:09:36AM +0200, Roel Janssen wrote:
> > > Looking at 'guix/scripts/system.scm', it seems that we always pass
> > > 256M
> > > of memory to the VM.  After bumping that to 4096M, I was able to
> > > produce a docker image.
> > 
> > Can you test somes values that are in between? Like, 512M, 1024M,
> > etc,
> > until we know how much is actually required? If 512M is enough, I
> > don't
> > see a problem with increasing the hard-coded value to that.
> > 
> 
> I monitored the VM's memory usage and it peaked at 1.6G. But after
> testing, it seems 1024 also works.
> 
> I tested with 2048 (worked), 1024 (worked), and 512 (didn't work).
> 
> > > I'd like to see what we can do here.  Assigning too little memory
> > > leads
> > > to problems generating the container, but assigning too much memory
> > > wil
> > > l cause problems for computing machines that don't have much memory
> > > to
> > > spare.
> > 
> 
> In that case... The attached patch would only increase the size when
> generating a Docker container image.  Would that be acceptable?
> 
> > There are some use cases for this code that we'd like to work on
> > low-resource machines (`guix system vm`), and other use cases (like
> > building Docker images) that shouldn't be expected to work on
> > machines
> > with limited RAM.
> > 
> > > Would it be a good idea to make it configurable at run-time?
> > 
> > Yeah, maybe.
> > 
> 
> I think it'd be better to have it somehow dynamically increase, but I
> don't see how I could determine the VM size needed for a given system
> configuration.  So perhaps the attached patch is an acceptable
> compromise.
> 
> Kind regards,
> Roel Janssen
> 

Looks good to me!

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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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