Profiling and Data.HashTable

[Adrian Hey]

On Friday 14 Oct 2005 3:17 pm, Ketil Malde wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a program that uses hash tables to store word counts.  It can
> use few, large hash tables, or many small ones.  The problem is that
> it uses an inordinate amount of time in the latter case, and
> profiling/-sstderr shows it is GC that is causing it (accounting for
> up to 99% of the time(!))
>
> Is there any reason to expect this behavior?
>
> Heap profiling shows that each hash table seems to incur a memory
> overhead of approx 5K, but apart from that, I'm not able to find any
> leaks or unexpected space consumption.
>
> Suggestions?

Well you could use a StringMap..
 http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~ahey/HLibs/Data.StringMap/

But that lib a bit lightweight so probably doesn't provide
everyting you need at the moment. But it's something I mean
to get back to when I have some time, so if there's anything
in particular you want let me know and I'll give it some
priority.

You certainly should not need anything like 5k overhead per
map, and you don't have to work via the IO monad either
(though you can use an MVar StringMap or something if you
like).

Also, I seem to remember some thread about some problem
with Data.HashTable implementation and space behaviour.
Unfortunately I can't remember what the problem was and
don't know if it's been fixed :-(

Regards
--
Adrian Hey