[Haskell-cafe] Multi threaded garbage collector

[Andrew Coppin]

Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I did some experiments with concurrent Haskell, and unfortunately I 
> couldn't get my code run faster when using more cores, actually it ran 
> a bit slower.
>
> Now I noticed after profiling that about 70% of the time my program 
> was performing garbage collection (I had lists of 50000 tiny objects 
> that got recreated 100 times per second).
>
> If I understood it correctly, the current garbage collector of GHC is 
> single threaded, which really hinders SMP
>
> Any plans on improving this or workarounds?

Parallel or not, if you can figure out a way to make your program 
require less GC work, it will go faster.

The current GC requires all Haskell threads to be halted while it does 
its work. I understand there is a new GC under development that uses 
multiple cores [i.e., a GC pass now takes less time]. However, it still 
required all Haskell threads to be halted while it runs. (It's just that 
it takes less time to run now.)

Either way, if you can somehow figure out how to do less GC, you'll win. 
Notice that sometimes just doing work in a different order can 
significantly reduce GC load.