[Haskell-cafe] using Map rather than FiniteMap

[Simon Marlow]

On 26 January 2005 14:29, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:

> Ah, ok.  So I ran the code with 100000 items,
> 50000 items, and 25000 items and got total memory
> in use of 28Mb, 15Mb, and 8Mb respectively.  That
> comes to 260-280 bytes per record which is still
> an order of magnitude higher than the 20-30 bytes
> per record we would expect.

When using the ordinary 2-generation collector, memory in use will tend
to be 2-3 times larger than the actual residency, because this is a
copying collector.

> On the other hand, I found 10mb, 5mb, and 2.5mb
> maximum residency, but that is still ~100 bytes
> per record.

Right.

> Lastly, I tried "example +RTS -p -K5M -hc" and
> then looked at the resulting graph (attachment #2)
> and it shows a total of 1.6Mb heap allocated and
> if that data is correct, it does correspond
> roughly to our 20-30 bytes per record estimate.

That profile doesn't include the stack, which sounds reasonable.

> Regarding stack, I tried "example +RTS -p -K5M -xt
> -hc" and then ran hp2ps and looked at the
> resulting graph (attachment #1) SYSTEM appears to
> use 4mb of stack at the very beginning (presumably
> to create "zipped"), but I don't know why it
> would.  Then this stack is consumed by the rest of
> the program.

Stacks never get smaller in GHC, only bigger.  If you need 4Mb of stack
at one point in your program, you will forever have a 4Mb stack after
that (fixing this wouldn't really buy you much; the memory doesn't get
traversed or copied by the GC - but one thing you could do is madvise()
to tell the OS it doesn't have to page the memory, though).

I haven't looked at your code in detail, hopefully someone else can shed
some light on why you're building up such a large stack in the first
place.

Cheers,
	Simon