Wildly inaccurate profiling results

[Kirsten Chevalier]

[Sorry if this shows up twice -- I accidentally posted from the wrong address
and left something out.]

I have a program, compiled with cost-center profiling on, that takes about 5
minutes, 30 seconds to run (measured with a stopwatch), but the resulting .prof
file reports the total time as 34 seconds. I know that this number doesn't
include overhead due to profiling, but surely the overhead can't be that much!
(Also, the program runs about as long when run without -P.)  I'm using a copy
of GHC built from sources checked out around July 1. Also, using "top" I've
observed that the program takes up about 120MB of memory, and I have much more
memory than that, so there's no swapping going on. I'd include the program, but
it's very large and I'm not sure how to minimize it and preserve the same
behavior. Any ideas as to what the problem might be?

Thanks,
Kirsten

-- 
Kirsten Chevalier * krc at cs.berkeley.edu * Often in error, never in doubt
"I always feel I have to take a stand, and there's always someone on hand to
hate me for standing there / I always feel I have to open my mouth, and every
time I do, I offend someone somewhere..."--Ani DiFranco
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~krc/