[Haskell-cafe] Memory usage of cabal install

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 12:56 +0200, Krzysztof Kościuszkiewicz wrote:
> Hello Haskell-Café,
> 
> I have a problem with high memory usage of cabal-install.  Whenever I
> try to install or upgrade a package, cabal manages to consume 1,3G of
> memory before I killed it (on a 32-bit machine with 1 GB of memory).
> 
> Increasing verbosity does not help, memory consumption goes up after the
> message "Resolving dependencies..." shows up.
> 
> I use ghc 6.8.2 and cabal-install version 0.5.1 using version 1.4.0.1 of
> the Cabal library.

The only instance of this behaviour that I know of involves using that
version of cabal-install with ghc-6.10.1.

http://haskell.org/cabal/FAQ.html#cabal-goes-into-an-infinite-loop--runs-out-of-memory

The older version of cabal-install goes into an infinite loop when using
ghc-6.10, when it is presented with two installed versions of the base
package (and one depends on the other). In version 0.6.x cabal-install
was updated to understand this situation.

Are you absolutely sure you are using ghc 6.8 and not 6.10?

> Is there a workaround? I would like to avoid fetching & building packages
> manually.

If you're using ghc 6.10 then the solution is to update to cabal-install
0.6.x. If you're quite sure you are using 6.8 then the bug is unknown.
It may still be worth trying upgrading to cabal-install 0.6.x.

Duncan