On CI

[Karel Gardas]

On 3/17/21 4:16 PM, Andreas Klebinger wrote:
> Now that isn't really an issue anyway I think. The question is rather is
> 2% a large enough regression to worry about? 5%? 10%?

5-10% is still around system noise even on lightly loaded workstation.
Not sure if CI is not run on some shared cloud resources where it may be
even higher.

I've done simple experiment of pining ghc compiling ghc-cabal and I've
been able to "speed" it up by 5-10% on W-2265.

Also following this CI/performance regs discussion I'm not entirely sure
if  this is not just a witch-hunt hurting/beating mostly most active GHC
developers. Another idea may be to give up on CI doing perf reg testing
at all and invest saved resources into proper investigation of
GHC/Haskell programs performance. Not sure, if this would not be more
beneficial longer term.

Just one random number thrown to the ring. Linux's perf claims that
nearly every second L3 cache access on the example above ends with cache
miss. Is it a good number or bad number? See stats below (perf stat -d
on ghc with +RTS -T -s -RTS').

Good luck to anybody working on that!

Karel


Linking utils/ghc-cabal/dist/build/tmp/ghc-cabal ...
  61,020,836,136 bytes allocated in the heap
   5,229,185,608 bytes copied during GC
     301,742,768 bytes maximum residency (19 sample(s))
       3,533,000 bytes maximum slop
             840 MiB total memory in use (0 MB lost due to fragmentation)

                                     Tot time (elapsed)  Avg pause  Max
pause
  Gen  0      2012 colls,     0 par    5.725s   5.731s     0.0028s
0.1267s
  Gen  1        19 colls,     0 par    1.695s   1.696s     0.0893s
0.2636s

  TASKS: 4 (1 bound, 3 peak workers (3 total), using -N1)

  SPARKS: 0 (0 converted, 0 overflowed, 0 dud, 0 GC'd, 0 fizzled)

  INIT    time    0.000s  (  0.000s elapsed)
  MUT     time   27.849s  ( 32.163s elapsed)
  GC      time    7.419s  (  7.427s elapsed)
  EXIT    time    0.000s  (  0.010s elapsed)
  Total   time   35.269s  ( 39.601s elapsed)

  Alloc rate    2,191,122,004 bytes per MUT second

  Productivity  79.0% of total user, 81.2% of total elapsed


 Performance counter stats for
'/export/home/karel/sfw/ghc-8.10.3/bin/ghc -H32m -O -Wall -optc-Wall -O0
-hide-all-packages -package ghc-prim -package base -package binary
-package array -package transformers -package time -package containers
-package bytestring -package deepseq -package process -package pretty
-package directory -package filepath -package template-haskell -package
unix --make utils/ghc-cabal/Main.hs -o
utils/ghc-cabal/dist/build/tmp/ghc-cabal -no-user-package-db -Wall
-fno-warn-unused-imports -fno-warn-warnings-deprecations
-DCABAL_VERSION=3,4,0,0 -DBOOTSTRAPPING -odir bootstrapping -hidir
bootstrapping libraries/Cabal/Cabal/Distribution/Fields/Lexer.hs
-ilibraries/Cabal/Cabal -ilibraries/binary/src -ilibraries/filepath
-ilibraries/hpc -ilibraries/mtl -ilibraries/text/src
libraries/text/cbits/cbits.c -Ilibraries/text/include
-ilibraries/parsec/src +RTS -T -s -RTS':

         39,632.99 msec task-clock                #    0.999 CPUs
utilized
            17,191      context-switches          #    0.434 K/sec

                 0      cpu-migrations            #    0.000 K/sec

           899,930      page-faults               #    0.023 M/sec

   177,636,979,975      cycles                    #    4.482 GHz
              (87.54%)
   181,945,795,221      instructions              #    1.02  insn per
cycle           (87.59%)
    34,033,574,511      branches                  #  858.718 M/sec
              (87.42%)
     1,664,969,299      branch-misses             #    4.89% of all
branches          (87.48%)
    41,522,737,426      L1-dcache-loads           # 1047.681 M/sec
              (87.53%)
     2,675,319,939      L1-dcache-load-misses     #    6.44% of all
L1-dcache hits    (87.48%)
       372,370,395      LLC-loads                 #    9.395 M/sec
              (87.49%)
       173,614,140      LLC-load-misses           #   46.62% of all
LL-cache hits     (87.46%)

      39.663103602 seconds time elapsed

      38.288158000 seconds user
       1.358263000 seconds sys