How big is the binary cache? Would it be reasonable to make a mirror?

[shelvacu]

I can find some information about mirroring (eg https://github.com/NixIPFS/nixipfs-scripts/tree/master/nixipfs which is very old) but nothing on even the order-of-magnitude scale. Would it be reasonable? Would staff hate me for using bandwidth if I copy everything?

[vcunat]

Something like 800 TB IIRC.

[RaitoBezarius]

If you want a mirror for it, I recommend reaching out to the Foundation and look into the price for an AWS Snowball or two to get it shipped to you (at your expenses).

[wamserma]

Here’s a summary:

NixOS Foundation's Financial Summary: A Transparent Look into 2022

Some info on our AWS costs (primarily cache.nixos.org and releases.nixos.org): The S3 bucket for cache.nixos.org stores 667M objects, with 107 TiB in standard storage and 318 TiB in infrequent access storage, so 425 TiB in total. The S3 bucket for nix-releases (i.e. https://releases.nixos.org) is 25.1 TiB (mostly ISO images). The S3 storage costs for our sponsor are about $5500 per month, after a $2300 enterprise discount. The S3 transfer costs are about $900 per month, which is most…

[vccs]

The only mirrors for Nix binary cache I know in real world are hosted in China. They are powered by https://github.com/tuna/tunasync-scripts/blob/3cbfef6b4ecf6ae9dea97667479ff1c4ef403d6f/nix-channels.py.

[shelvacu]

Wow I had no idea. 400TB is definitely not reasonable for me, I’m just a hobbyist

[TLATER]

In fairness, given the linked discussion, a lot of that is “legacy”, and from NixOS versions that are EOL. You could probably mirror part just the more relevant stuff by a mechanism other than an AWS snowball.