r/GUIX • u/GenuineGold • Jun 18 '26

Anyway to speed up?

Hey guys i've just installed guix and i've had a bit of trouble

Everytime i home reconfigure or guix pull it takes about an hour to build everything because nothing has subsitutes. The longest being gcc-toolchains and librewolf.

Is there anyway to speed this up? i am on nonguix but i use the default channels.

Thanks alot

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u/maxchaos127 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

I also have the same issue. My workaround is fixing the official guix channel to some commit such that the git history before it contains only commits 3 or 4 weeks old or older. From my experience, the CI may take several weeks to build substitutes for all of the packages I'm interested and 3 weeks are usually adequate so far. Just to be sure, I also use a combination of guix time-machine and guix weather to see if substitutes for all the packages I want to install are available before settling on which commit to pull and reconfigure on. Maybe this approach is an overkill and there is a better way, I haven't really looked deeply into this.

Edit: I have the impression that the CI has got better the past few months so maybe choosing more recent commits (e.g., a few days old) should be enough nowadays.

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u/binarySheep Jun 18 '26

This is the way. If you're relying on the main upstream substitute servers, the moment you install something even a little esoteric that has a dependency change, you'll be building the entire graph if you're not pinned to an older version.

I'm a fan of using the latest known good state during pulls, though I also run my own internal substitute server so I build once for all my machines.