bug#35660: guix weather runaway memory consumption

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Danny,

Danny Milosavljevic <address@hidden> skribis:

> The failure mode here is very very bad.  Guix will consume all available
> memory and then start on the swap, at which point the computer will
> become unresponsive to any input and the user can't save any open
> documents and has to kill the power to the computer.

I agree that the failure mode is terrible.  It’s very likely a cycle in
the package graph, given the symptoms you describe.  So ‘guix build
OFFENDING-PACKAGE’ would probably give you the same result.

Chris Baines proposed a patch a while back to detect and report cycles,
but we never got around to polishing and integrating it.  That would
probably help a lot in these cases.

We can open a new bug for that (if there’s not already one), but I think
it should be framed in terms of cycle detection in the package graph and
error reporting.

Thanks,
Ludo’.