Linux CI machines are running the conda create --clone command very slowly

It takes 4 minutes to run while on the mac machine it is much faster.

Apparently, under Linux, that command is copying all files instead of hard-linking them, therefore the slowness. This is also taking a lot of disk space (cannot blame docker container). Needs to be fixed by understanding why hardlinks are not being created.

Correction - the culprit is not Linux, but the huge size the dev env has on Linux (5.2 Gb) compared to Mac OSX (1.7 Gb). The hard-linked environment on Linux occupies 2.7 Gb while on the Mac, only 150 Mb. For these reasons, one can understand why Linux builds are so slow and why the whole disk space of the CI is being taken.

A mitigation option would be to roll-out conda-based builds.

mentioned in commit 3c3f15cd

@andre.anjos I remember that at some point we had virtualenv based builds which were really fast. Can we switch back to those for the time being?

mentioned in merge request !61 (closed)

With reverting back to the default kernel (I think), this is now as fast as on the mac.

closed