Performance
Several components can impact conda-store's overall performance. They are listed and described in order of decreasing impact below.
Worker storage
When conda-store builds a given environment it has to locally install the environment in the directory specified in the Traitlets configuration CondaStore.store_directory.
Conda environments consist of many hardlinks to small files.
This means that the performance of store_directory is limited to the number of
Input/output operations per second (IOPS) the directory can
perform.
Many cloud providers have high performance storage options you can consider.
When to use NFS
If you do not need to mount the environments via NFS into the containers, it's recommend to not use NFS and instead use traditional block storage. Not only is it significantly cheaper, but also the IOPS performance will be better.
If you want to mount the environments in containers or running VMs, then NFS may be a good option. With NFS, many cloud providers provide a high performance filesystem option at a significant premium in cost, like GCP Filestore, Amazon EFS, and Azure Files.
Choosing an NFS storage option with low IOPS will result in long environment creation times.
Network speed
While conda does its best to cache packages, it will have to connect over the internet
to download the repodata.json along with the packages.
Thus network speeds can impact performance, but typically cloud environments have plenty fast Internet.
Artifact storage
All build artifacts from conda-store are stored in object storage that behaves like Amazon S3. S3 traditionally has great performance if you use the cloud provider implementation.