The amount of space taken up by (Pkg) precompile files is too damn high

[KristofferC]

~/.julia/juliaup/julia-nightly/share/julia/compiled/v1.13/Pkg
❯ ls -lh
total 161M
-rw-r--r-- 1 kc kc 635K Jul  8 09:29 tUTdb_Bb0JR.ji
-rwxr-xr-x 1 kc kc  86M Jul  8 09:29 tUTdb_Bb0JR.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 kc kc 635K Jul  9 12:11 tUTdb_PxeFS.ji
-rwxr-xr-x 1 kc kc  74M Jul  8 09:29 tUTdb_PxeFS.so

To me, it is quite unreasonable that Pkg.jl should take up 86 MB. As a comparison, in 1.6 the whole sysimage took 179 MB (which also included Pkg and all other stdlibs).

It would be good to figure out what is going on.

@IanButterworth has started some stuff in PkgCacheInspector to get more info out of the files timholy/PkgCacheInspector.jl#36.

[joa-quim]

Aleluia, I've been saying this for years (not only Pkg). And we can also delete one of them (the duplicate as it was called in one thread) as well as all the similar under the compiled, which shaves some 180 MB of the total install, without any visible consequence.

[KristofferC]

The reason both are there is due to wanting to have a working precompile file available when running Pkg.test. Otherwise that would have to recompile om every CI run for packages (assuming no caching is used). But that's not really the point of the issue, it's investigating why a single one is so big.

[KristofferC]

One thing I noticed is that locally (with native CPU target) the file is only 45 MB, compared to 74 MB on + nightly so it seems multi-versioning does quite a lot.

[giordano]

I guess #54471 had an effect on this.