Hej fellow people of the future ;-),
So let me preface by saying that this was the part that annoyed me the most about executing a guix upgrade, waiting for the profile generation as the last step in the process. Back when I first installed guix on an hdd for testing, this process would sometimes take as much as 1,5-2h with about 180 packages. Even after I switched to SDD, this would feel like the lenghtiest part of the upgrade process, for reasons I never quite understood.
Today I did another guix pull && guix upgrade, followed by guix remove PACKAGENAMES. I wanted to declutter my profile and speed up said lengthy "profile generation" process. I had been prepared that removing 22 packages would still take 5-10 minutes, the biggest part of it being the profile generation part. But then... it took like 15 seconds.
What has happened? I mean, I am very delighted with this change, because this makes installing and removing packages a literal breeze. I repeat, I've hated doing this on guix because it took just soooo long. Now, having the time I need to wait reduced to about 10% of its original time feels like something either must be wrong, or some kind of black magic has occured which definately cannot be of good origin.
Does this have to do with the "taming the stat storm" article that has been written about 1,5months ago by ludovic courtes? Have you also experienced something similar in the very recent time (I'm speaking about the last 1-2 weeks)? If not, can you offer an explanation why, after about 2 years of casual use, my profile generation FINALLY stops being a headache?
Have a good day, fellows!
EDIT: u/zimoun has provided me with valuable information as to why the speed-up has occurred. Thanks a bunch for the support, fellow guixter, for helping a newbie realise how awesome guix actually is and at which pace it gets better and better (*cough* guix home *cough*).
To quote:
First, another build farm (Build Coordinator behind bordeaux.guix.gnu.org) had been added recently, and second ci.guix.gnu.org has received several improvements). So the avaibility of substitutes is better.
The stats storm helps. And different strategies for compressing the substitutes depending if you are CPU-bound or Network-bound.