[Haskell-cafe] Re: Threads with high CPU usage

[Ryan Ingram]

You shouldn't need forkOS, but without -threaded (and related RTS
switches to enable multithreading) I think you are sunk.  Without
enabling multithreading support, you are saying that your program
(which might use concurrency features of Haskell) will run on a single
OS thread.  During a foreign call that never calls back into Haskell,
then, there's no place for the RTS to pre-empt and switch back to
Haskell code.

It's kind of confusing with multiple things named threads; call a
Haskell thread a "lightweight" thread, and an OS thread a "heavy"
thread.  Each heavy thread can either be executing Haskell lightweight
threads, or inside a foreign out-call.  Once you jump across to
foreign-land, the heavy thread can't do anything (even for a "safe"
out-call) until the out-call either makes an in-call back into Haskell
code, or returns.

Enabling -threaded allows the Haskell runtime to create more heavy
threads; even without -threaded you can make as many lightweight
threads as you like and the runtime will handle scheduling them for
you; a heavy thread can carry many light threads.  But a foreign call
takes a whole heavy thread no matter what.

  -- ryan

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Günther Schmidt <redcom at fedoms.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I just tried to forkIO-off the database code to keep the UI responsive using
> Takusen with Sqlite this time.
>
> The problem persists though, the UI freezes.
>
> AFAIK the sqlite-Takusen code does not use unsafe ccall which would block
> the thread, so that might not be the cause of the problem after all.
>
> Before you guys make the effort to "fix" this you might see if you can
> reproduce the problem maybe uploading a 50 MB file into an Sqlite database,
> for instance, or something else that will keep the database busy for some
> time in a row.
>
> I did not use -threaded and forkOS though.
>
> Günther
>
>
>
> Am 22.12.2008, 21:59 Uhr, schrieb John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org>:
>
>> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 04:28:03PM -0000, Bayley, Alistair wrote:
>>>
>>> > From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org
>>> > [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Günther Schmidt
>>> >
>>> > I understand that Takusen does not use "unsafe" calls and
>>> > would like to
>>> > try it with that one then, but haven't find enough docs yet
>>> > on how to use
>>> > Takusen.
>>>
>>> Not a lot of detailed examples exist for Takusen. I'm hoping the
>>> documentation for Database.Enumerator is a reasonable place to start.
>>> http://darcs.haskell.org/takusen/doc/html/Database-Enumerator.html
>>>
>>> I just reviewed the Takusen code and, for no apparent reason, the ODBC
>>> module specifies unsafe for all of its FFI imports, but the other modules do
>>> not (so they get the default, which I assume is safe). I also was not aware
>>> of unsafe calls blocking other threads. I'll change the ODBC imports to be
>>> safe (or rather, unspecified).
>>
>> Makes sense.  I will make the similar change in all HDBC backends.
>>
>> -- John
>>
>
>
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