9.8 Invoking guix size
The guix size command helps package developers profile the
disk usage of packages. It is easy to overlook the impact of an
additional dependency added to a package, or the impact of using a
single output for a package that could easily be split (see Packages with Multiple Outputs). Such are the typical issues that
guix size can highlight.
The command can be passed one or more package specifications
such as gcc@4.8
or guile:debug, or a file name in the store. Consider this
example:
$ guix size coreutils
store item total self
/gnu/store/…-gcc-5.5.0-lib 60.4 30.1 38.1%
/gnu/store/…-glibc-2.27 30.3 28.8 36.6%
/gnu/store/…-coreutils-8.28 78.9 15.0 19.0%
/gnu/store/…-gmp-6.1.2 63.1 2.7 3.4%
/gnu/store/…-bash-static-4.4.12 1.5 1.5 1.9%
/gnu/store/…-acl-2.2.52 61.1 0.4 0.5%
/gnu/store/…-attr-2.4.47 60.6 0.2 0.3%
/gnu/store/…-libcap-2.25 60.5 0.2 0.2%
total: 78.9 MiB
The store items listed here constitute the transitive closure of
Coreutils—i.e., Coreutils and all its dependencies, recursively—as
would be returned by:
$ guix gc -R /gnu/store/…-coreutils-8.23
Here the output shows three columns next to store items. The first column,
labeled “total”, shows the size in mebibytes (MiB) of the closure of
the store item—that is, its own size plus the size of all its
dependencies. The next column, labeled “self”, shows the size of the
item itself. The last column shows the ratio of the size of the item
itself to the space occupied by all the items listed here.
In this example, we see that the closure of Coreutils weighs in at
79 MiB, most of which is taken by libc and GCC’s run-time support
libraries. (That libc and GCC’s libraries represent a large fraction of
the closure is not a problem per se because they are always available
on the system anyway.)
Since the command also accepts store file names, assessing the size of
a build result is straightforward:
guix size $(guix system build config.scm)
When the package(s) passed to guix size are available in the
store21, guix size queries the daemon to determine its
dependencies, and measures its size in the store, similar to du
-ms --apparent-size (see du invocation in GNU
Coreutils).
When the given packages are not in the store, guix size
reports information based on the available substitutes
(see Substitutes). This makes it possible it to profile disk usage of
store items that are not even on disk, only available remotely.
You can also specify several package names:
$ guix size coreutils grep sed bash
store item total self
/gnu/store/…-coreutils-8.24 77.8 13.8 13.4%
/gnu/store/…-grep-2.22 73.1 0.8 0.8%
/gnu/store/…-bash-4.3.42 72.3 4.7 4.6%
/gnu/store/…-readline-6.3 67.6 1.2 1.2%
…
total: 102.3 MiB
In this example we see that the combination of the four packages takes
102.3 MiB in total, which is much less than the sum of each closure
since they have a lot of dependencies in common.
When looking at the profile returned by guix size, you may
find yourself wondering why a given package shows up in the profile at
all. To understand it, you can use guix graph --path -t
references to display the shortest path between the two packages
(see Invoking guix graph).
The available options are:
- --substitute-urls=urls
Use substitute information from urls.
See the same option for guix build.
- --sort=key
Sort lines according to key, one of the following options:
selfthe size of each item (the default);
closurethe total size of the item’s closure.
- --map-file=file
Write a graphical map of disk usage in PNG format to file.
For the example above, the map looks like this:
This option requires that
Guile-Charting be
installed and visible in Guile’s module search path. When that is not
the case, guix size fails as it tries to load it.
- --system=system
- -s system
Consider packages for system—e.g., x86_64-linux.
- --load-path=directory
- -L directory
Add directory to the front of the package module search path
(see Package Modules).
This allows users to define their own packages and make them visible to
the command-line tools.