Heap usage of GHC increased in 7.8 vs. 7.6

[Simon Marlow]

On 18/04/14 20:42, Austin Seipp wrote:
> 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?

I don't think it will.  Except for orphan modules, interfaces are 
normally only loaded when we actually use something defined in that module.

Perhaps this isn't a huge deal since it's a small fixed overhead, but it 
bugs me nonetheless.

Cheers,
Simon


> 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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>
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