| 21 Jan 2026 |
 eveeifyeve | That will give me a total of 4+4+4=12 performance cores 4+4+8=16 efficiency cores and 32gb of ram across the builders. | 14:37:41 |
 Ihar Hrachyshka | this is... not normal / not what I would expect | 14:37:46 |
| eveeifyeve | * That will give me a total of 4+4+4=12 performance cores 4+4+8=16 efficiency cores with 28 cores in total and 32gb of ram across the builders. | 14:38:06 |
| Ihar Hrachyshka | I may measure some builds this week then. maybe something gets stuck during build and it's not about waiting longer. | 14:38:42 |
| eveeifyeve | Which considering if I can get those two macbooks working and in a tailscale or something would be great for me building stuff. | 14:38:59 |
| eveeifyeve | All I am missing now is a linux machine to build stuff..... | 14:39:11 |
| Ihar Hrachyshka | you can use multiple builders but can't parallelize a huge build like firefox across machines sadly | 14:39:28 |
| eveeifyeve | Sadly 😥 | 14:39:59 |
| eveeifyeve | Hang on isn't there something like enableParallelBuilding which is enabled by default or it was at least was. | 14:41:58 |
| eveeifyeve | * Hang on isn't there something like enableParallelBuilding which is enabled by default or it was at least was??? | 14:42:03 |
 K900 | That doesn't do what you think it does | 14:42:37 |
| Ihar Hrachyshka | it's parallel building like "use more cores on the same machine, make -j etc." | 14:42:39 |
 Randy Eckenrode | That passes the equivalent of -j $CORES. | 14:43:08 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Were you building other things? Nix is awful on workstations because it will pass -jX to X builds and spike your load average to something horrible. | 14:44:12 |
| eveeifyeve | So you I guess you can't set each machine to use the full core amount when you build or all of them at once in a distributed matter? | 14:44:51 |
| eveeifyeve | * So, I guess you can't set each machine to use the full core amount when you build or all of them at once in a distributed matter? | 14:44:57 |
| Randy Eckenrode | There are flags that some builders understand to limit load average, and there’s a protocol for managing build parallelism, but Nix supports none of that. The PR to let you set the desired load limit has been stalled for years. | 14:45:08 |
| Randy Eckenrode | I limit my Nix to no more than four builds as a compromise. | 14:45:27 |
| Ihar Hrachyshka | also I'd double check if it actually used the beefy machine. I see community builder in the screenshot. | 14:45:50 |
| Randy Eckenrode | You can, but Firefox or Swill will use whatever cores are on the machines where they’re built. They won’t use other machines. | 14:46:12 |
| eveeifyeve | Is there a pr upstream made already to try to support this protocol that I could potentially could look at? | 14:46:32 |
 Austin Horstman | yeah, i think i had some other stuff going so it's not a completely accurate time | 14:46:59 |
| Austin Horstman | that was for the rosetta-builder aarch64-linux | 14:47:26 |
| K900 | That's fundamentally busted for a variety of reasons | 14:47:50 |
| K900 | It was actively explored a long time ago | 14:48:03 |
| eveeifyeve | Because I know there is parallel eval pr that was super outdated that was going to be remade. | 14:48:12 |
| K900 | That's entirely unrelated | 14:48:25 |
| Ihar Hrachyshka | there's https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/11143 that gives feedback about load. not merged. | 14:49:03 |
| eveeifyeve | Yes, but that is for eval which I will be mentioning at the nix meeting to see what is the movement on that. | 14:49:35 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Support in Nix for the Make protocol is hypothetical. One big reason not to bother is Ninja doesn’t support it (but not for lack of trying). The PR to add NIX_LOAD_LIMIT for supporting -l is https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/11143. | 14:50:25 |
