[Haskell-cafe] How can we detect and fix memory leak due to lazyness?

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

kyagrd:
> On 8/7/06, Spencer Janssen <spencerjanssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >Forcing evaluation using (==) is a bit of a hack.  Luckily, we have a
> >better function to force evaluation: seq (which has type a -> b -> b).
> > "seq x y" evaluates "x" to weak head normal form before returning
> >"y".
> >
> >Let's try another feature of Haskell to force evaluation: strict data
> >fields.  A ! in front of a field in a data declaration signifies
> >strictness.  In the example below, whenever we construct a value with
> >TT, the second argument is evaluated.
> >
> >\begin{code}
> >data TT a b = TT a !b
> >\end{code}
> >
> >Perhaps your instances will work correctly with this data declaration?
> 
> Surely I've tried that.
> 
> Unfortunately seq and the strict data declaration is not helpful in general.
> They are only helpful on base values such as Int or Bool.
> What they do is just making sure that it is not a thunk.
> That is if it was a list it would just evaluate to see the cons cell
> but no further.
> 
> Someone wrote a deepSeq module for forcing deep evaluation, which is
> like doing self equality strictness hack like x==x.
> However, we should be able to locate what is the source of the memory
> leak to apply such strictness tricks.


The key is to profile. Compile the code, with optimisations on, with
-prof -auto-all, then run the resulting program with +RTS -p -RTS.
This will identify costly and timely functions.

You can then refine the search further with {-# SCC "line1" #-} pragmas,
next to expressoins you want to check the cost of.

-- Don