Heap usage of GHC increased in 7.8 vs. 7.6

[Austin Seipp]

Yes, you're right regarding the AMP patches. Concerning this, I looked
the patch back up to refresh my memory, and there reason we do this
was because we need to check (and warn) if there are locally defined
names in the current module which would clash with names from the
Applicative-Monad proposal, among others - notably, naming functions
like 'join' or whatnot in the current scope clashes. This means we
wire in the 'Name's for join, <*>, etc from Control.Applicative and
Control.Monad so we can check against them later, which implies
loading the interfaces I believe.

Perhaps we don't even need a wired Name for this particular step,
which would sidestep that issue.

But thinking about it - even fixing that, is this even avoidable,
ultimately? The AMP warnings in 7.8 are actually temporary, and will
be gone from HEAD soon. But once we do that and AMP is actually
*implemented* in base, won't it essentially imply the loading of these
same interfaces by default, and thus about the same amount of memory
use?

Or is there a planned module refactoring/shuffling too, since we're
already breaking some user code this cycle? If there is, maybe this
won't be problematic in the end or we should revisit it when the
numbers are solid. I honestly don't know what all the expected
intra-module changes might be (I've CC'd Edward in case he'd like to
chime in about that.)


On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 10:39 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> I noticed that T1969 is failing again, and decided to do a little
> investigation.  The maximum residency when compiling T1969 with HEAD
> compared with 7.6.3 looks like this:
>
> 7.6.3: 10,473,920
> HEAD:  13,783,536
>
> This is with +RTS -h -i0.01 to avoid sampling errors as much as possible.
> The figures are pretty accurate, and the heap profiles confirm it: we're
> using a lot more heap now.
>
> -ddump-if-trace shows that HEAD is reading more interface files:
>
> Renamer stats: 10 interfaces read
>                6 type/class/variable imported, out of 1361 read
>                0 instance decls imported, out of 105 read
>                0 rule decls imported, out of 53 read
>
> vs. with 7.6.3:
>
> Renamer stats: 8 interfaces read
>                2 type/class/variable imported, out of 828 read
>                0 instance decls imported, out of 40 read
>                0 rule decls imported, out of 45 read
>
> The extra interface files are Control.Applicative and Control.Monad.  So the
> question is, why are we now reading these on *every* compilation? (T1969
> imports only the Prelude).  Presumably this is something to do with the AMP
> warnings, but can't we lazily load these interfaces when they're needed?
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
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-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/