treewide: drop -l$NIX_BUILD_CORES

Passing `-l$NIX_BUILD_CORES` improperly limits the overall system load.

For a build machine which is configured to run `$B` builds where each
build gets `total cores / B` cores (`$C`), passing `-l $C` to make will
improperly limit the load to `$C` instead of `$B * $C`.

This effect becomes quite pronounced on machines with 80 cores, with
40 simultaneous builds and a cores limit of 2. On a machine with this
configuration, Nix will run 40 builds and make will limit the overall
system load to approximately 2. A build machine with this many cores
can happily run with a load approaching 80.

A non-solution is to oversubscribe the machine, by picking a larger
`$C`. However, there is no way to divide the number of cores in a way
which fairly subdivides the available cores when `$B` is greater than
1.

There has been exploration of passing a jobserver in to the sandbox,
or sharing a jobserver between all the builds. This is one option, but
relatively complicated and only supports make. Lots of other software
uses its own implementation of `-j` and doesn't support either `-l` or
the Make jobserver.

For the case of an interactive user machine, the user should limit
overall system load using `$B`, `$C`, and optionally systemd's
cpu/network/io limiting features.

Making this change should significantly improve the utilization of our
build farm, and improve the throughput of Hydra.

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/pkgs/tools/admin/tigervnc/default.nix b/pkgs/tools/admin/tigervnc/default.nix
index 549096ec0e430..724301854b403 100644
--- a/pkgs/tools/admin/tigervnc/default.nix
+++ b/pkgs/tools/admin/tigervnc/default.nix
@@ -92,7 +92,7 @@ stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
         --with-xkb-path=${xkeyboard_config}/share/X11/xkb \
         --with-xkb-bin-directory=${xorg.xkbcomp}/bin \
         --with-xkb-output=$out/share/X11/xkb/compiled
-    make TIGERVNC_SRC=$src TIGERVNC_BUILDDIR=`pwd`/../.. -j$NIX_BUILD_CORES -l$NIX_BUILD_CORES
+    make TIGERVNC_SRC=$src TIGERVNC_BUILDDIR=`pwd`/../.. -j$NIX_BUILD_CORES
     popd
   '' + lib.optionalString stdenv.isDarwin ''
     make dmg