General question: how to avoid running out of memory or freezing when building Nix derivations

[waffle8946]

@arianvp

There is cgroup support in Nix

How so? The closest I found (4 years old, to be fair) was

Managing Nix build resources with cgroups?

If you want to constrain the nix-daemon (i.e. all builds, not individual ones) using cgroups (via systemd) you could use something like this: systemd.services.nix-daemon.serviceConfig = { MemoryHigh = "5G"; MemoryMax = "6G"; }; There are a lot of options (see e.g. systemd.resource-control and systemd.exec). If you want to instead constrains individual builds then it’ll be more difficult and probably require patching Nix (but I haven’t looked into this).

Did you mean something like this?