[Haskell-cafe] suggestion for HPDF (was: space leak?)

Massimiliano Gubinelli mgubi at mac.com
Sun Nov 4 10:45:00 EST 2007


Justin Bailey <jgbailey <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Massimiliano,
> 
> I had to update your code for it to compile (removed "sequence" from
> testpdf'. However, I don't see any significant difference in the
> memory profile of either testpdf or testpdf'.

Thanks Justin,
 indeed the two programs seems to have the same profile. I should have 
messed up with different versions and now I cannot reproduce the behaviour 
I was observing. However under Mac, Activity Monitor still gives different 
memory allocation to the two programs but maybe this is due to other
reasons. 
What still I do not understand is the huge allocation of memory, but I think 
it is due to the way HPDF write the PDF (it has no way to understand when 
a page has been finished). So here's a suggestion for the library: add a 
pageFinalize statement which flush the page to the disk without waiting. 
Further addition to the same page can be either made impossible or
 handled by standard PDF mechanism to deal with incremental editing 
(see the PDF reference).

Best,
Massimiliano

> 
> Not sure how you are watching the memory usage, but if you didn't know
> the option "+RTS -sstderr" will print out useful memory statistics
> when you run your program. E.g.:
> 
>   > pdf_test.exe +RTS -sstderr
> 
> gives:
> 
>   2,157,524,764 bytes allocated in the heap
>   246,516,688 bytes copied during GC (scavenged)
>   6,086,688 bytes copied during GC (not scavenged)
>   45,107,704 bytes maximum residency (8 sample(s))
>        4086 collections in generation 0 (  0.61s)
>           8 collections in generation 1 (  0.67s)
>         129 Mb total memory in use
>   INIT  time    0.02s  (  0.00s elapsed)
>   MUT   time    5.83s  (  7.48s elapsed)
>   GC    time    1.28s  (  1.45s elapsed)
>   RP    time    0.00s  (  0.00s elapsed)
>   PROF  time    0.00s  (  0.00s elapsed)
>   EXIT  time    0.00s  (  0.00s elapsed)
>   Total time    7.13s  (  8.94s elapsed)
>   %GC time      18.0%  (16.3% elapsed)
>   Alloc rate    369,202,098 bytes per MUT second
>   Productivity  81.8% of total user, 65.2% of total elapsed
> 
> Above you can see 45 MB was the max amount of memory ever in use - and
> according to the heap profiling I did it's about constant. I saw the
> same results when using "testpdf'".
> 
> A few tricks I've learned to reduce space usage:
> 
>   * Use strict returns ( return $! ...)
>   * foldl' over foldr unless you have to use foldr.
>   * Profile, profile, profile - understand who is hanging on to the
> memory (+RTS -hc) and how it's being used (+RTS -hb).
>   * Use +RTS -p to understand who's doing all the allocations and
> where your time is being spent.
>   * Approach profiling like a science experiment - make one change,
> observe if anything is different, rollback and make another change -
> observer the change. Keep notes!
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> Justin
> 






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