Caching behavior with --ci for large libraries

[MattTheCuber]

According to the docs, uv cache prune --ci "removes all pre-built wheels and unzipped source distributions from the cache".

Our project uses a few large libraries which take a long time to download from PyPi. For example, torch and it's dependencies (several nvidia packages) make up 2 GB of files that need to be downloaded (takes ~5 minutes to download and install with uv). Would it be possible to make the --ci flag not clear very large downloaded packages? Otherwise, an argument could be added to uv cache prune that doesn't clear libraries over a given size?

[MattTheCuber]

Example:

$ uv venv
Using CPython 3.9.21 interpreter at: /usr/bin/python
Creating virtual environment at: .venv
Activate with: source .venv/bin/activate
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ uv pip install torch --cache-dir .uv_cache
Resolved 22 packages in 528ms
Prepared 22 packages in 4m 58s
Installed 22 packages in 196ms
...
$ uv cache prune --ci --cache-dir .uv_cache
Pruning cache at: .uv_cache
Removed 13871 files (4.9GiB)
$ deactivate
$ rm -rf .venv
$ uv venv
Using CPython 3.9.21 interpreter at: /usr/bin/python
Creating virtual environment at: .venv
Activate with: source .venv/bin/activate
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ uv pip install torch --cache-dir .uv_cache
Resolved 22 packages in 487ms
Prepared 22 packages in 5m 02s
Installed 22 packages in 202ms
...

[Gankra]

If we do anything here, the CLI flag for a size limit is probably a good idea either way, as an override for any behaviour we pick.

Out of curiosity, did you measure how long it takes to upload+download everything from your cache (e.g. if you don't use prune --ci)? That kind of information is the crux of whether this will actually improve performance to do this.

[MattTheCuber]

Yes, I am currently using that method. It cuts off several minutes although it didn't measure the exact time difference.

[MattTheCuber]

My current fastest solution is to build a custom image that simply pip installs torch that way uv doesn't have to download or install it.