slow execution of built executables on a Mac

[Richard Eisenberg]

Hi devs,

I have a shiny, new iMac in my office. It's thus frustrating that it takes my iMac longer to build GHC than my trusty 28-month-old laptop. Building devel2 on a fresh checkout takes just about an hour. By contrast, my laptop is done after 30 minutes of work (same build settings). The laptop has a 2.8GHz Intel i7 running macOS 10.13.5; the desktop has a 3.5GHz Intel i5 running macOS 10.13.6. Both bootstrapped from the binary distro of GHC 8.6.1.

Watching GHC build, everything is snappy enough during the stage-1 build. But then, as soon as we start using GHC-produced executables, things slow down. It's most noticeable in the rts_dist_HC phase, which crawls. Stage 2 is pretty slow, too.

So: is there anything anyone knows about recent Macs not liking locally built executables? Or is there some local setting that I need to update? The prepackaged GHC seems to work well, so that gives me hope that someone knows what setting to tweak.

Thanks!
Richard