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doc(README): add details & requirements on database building - #327
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doc(README): add details & requirements on database building - Precise description about how the database is built. - Add notes explaining required time & RAM for building database locally, replacing old hint & making them more obvious. - Further point out independency from hardware configuration (see reasoning below) - Add hint about RAM usage esp. cause RAM is a hard-limited resource. Former commit 97e309f from 7 years ago stated a time of roughly 5 minutes, but today my laptop (Intel i5-10310U, 16 GiB RAM) needed 84 minutes. Probably also because nixpkgs got bigger in the last 7 years. Afterwards I also measured the execution time on a server I had available (VM on AMD EPYC 7713, 128 GiB RAM). Despite more performant hardware & better connectivity, the server needed 116 minutes. Measured the time on 2026-07-11 with nix-index 1.10.0 as served on NixOS 26.05 (NixOS/nixpkgs@0ad6f47).
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Pull request overview
Updates the README to better explain how nix-index builds its local database and to set clearer expectations about time and memory requirements when generating the database locally.
Changes:
- Clarifies the database build process (evaluate nixpkgs, then index built derivations from binary caches).
- Adds NOTE callouts to surface database build cost (time/RAM) in both “Flakes” and “Usage”.
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| ### Flakes | ||
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| > [!NOTE] | ||
| > Creating the database may take some time & resources, see [Usage](#Usage) section below. |
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| > Building the database locally may take up to **2 hours**, | ||
| > mostly independent from your hardware configuration, | ||
| > and requires roughly **10-12 GiB of RAM** as of July 2026. |
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Former commit 97e309f from 7 years ago stated a time of roughly 5 minutes, but today my laptop (Intel i5-10310U, 16 GiB RAM) needed 84 minutes. Probably also because nixpkgs got bigger in the last 7 years. Afterwards I also measured the execution time on a server I had available (VM on AMD EPYC 7713, 128 GiB RAM). Despite more performant hardware & better connectivity, the server needed 116 minutes. Measured the time on 2026-07-11 with nix-index 1.10.0 as served on NixOS 26.05 (NixOS/nixpkgs@0ad6f47).