This reduces memory consumption of
nix-instantiate \
-E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" { src = ./blender; } "echo foo"' \
--option nar-buffer-size 10000
(where ./blender is a 1.1 GiB tree) from 1716 to 36 MiB, while still
ensuring that we don't do any write I/O for small source paths (up to
'nar-buffer-size' bytes). The downside is that large paths are now
always written to a temporary location in the store, even if they
produce an already valid store path. Thus, adding large paths might be
slower and run out of disk space. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Of course, you can always
restore the old behaviour by setting 'nar-buffer-size' to a very high
value.
34f25124ba