Two Questions: 'memory consumption' and '-pgmL'

Simon Marlow simonmar@microsoft.com
Thu, 9 Jan 2003 11:35:34 -0000


> first of all, let me thank you for writing and maintaining this
> excellent compiler! I am using it a lot recently and I couldn't be
> more happy with it. Thanks! :-)
>=20
> I wouldn't be posting here, though, if hadn't had a questions ... So
> here I go:
>=20
>  (1) Using the DtdToHaskell tool, I converted the XML Docbook DTD to
>      Haskell code. The resulting parser is amazing: It is almost 4
>      megabyte large, 72800 lines of code. Now I tried to compile this
>      beast and ran fresh out of memory.
>=20
>      I fiddled with the RTS options to no avail. At some point GHC was
>      consuming more than 800 megabytes of RAM, what resulted in
>      serious thrashing (my machine has only 512 MB) and eventually the
>      process was terminated.
>=20
>      Does anyone have by any ideas how I could tackle this problem?
>      Can I reduce GHC's memory requirements somehow? Can I split the
>      module up and compile it in parts? In different phases? Anything?
>      (If nothing comes up, I guess buying some more RAM is the
>      answer.)

You can try fiddling with GHC's GC settings to reduce memory
consumption.  The section of the User's Guide on runtime flags has some
hints; I would try -c first (turn on the compacting collector).  Adding
more generations (eg. -G3) might help, and setting a maximum heap size
(eg. -M512m) will cause GHC to try to trim down its memory use when it
gets close to this boundary.  Remember to surround any RTS options with
+RTS ... -RTS.

>  (2) According to the documentation, GHC allows for setting the
>      literate pre-processor to be used when compiling an .lhs file.
>      This is supposed to occur with the '-pgmL' option, but no matter
>      what I try, GHC always tells me:
>=20
>         | ghc-5.04.2: unrecognised flags: -pgmL
>         | Usage: For basic information, try the `--help' option.
>=20
>      Am I doing something wrong or is the documentation out of synch
>      with the implementation?

Hmm, good point.  This option is missing from the implementation, thanks
for pointing it out.

Cheers,
	Simon