[Haskell-cafe] ThreadScope: Request for features for the performance tuning of parallel and concurrent Haskell programs

[Don Stewart]

marlowsd:
> Ben Lippmeier wrote:
>
>>
>> On 12/03/2009, at 12:24 AM, Satnam Singh wrote:
>>> Before making the release I thought it would be an idea to ask people 
>>> what other features people would find useful or performance tuning. 
>>> So if you have any suggestions please do let us know!
>>>
>>
>> Is it available in a branch somewhere to try out?
>
> There are three parts to it:
>
>  - some patches to GHC to generate the log files.  The patches are
>    not yet in, but I hope to get them in in the next couple of weeks.

Just as a meta-point, it makes a *lot* of sense for the runtime to
support proper logging -- it's practically a microkernel after all, so
logging makes as much sense for GHC's rts as it does for regular
kernels.

Now we just need a /proc for the rts, so I can peek at GC stats live.

>  - a Haskell library for parsing the log files.  This will be up
>    on Hackage soon.  You can use this to write your own analysis
>    tools, visualisers, or whatever.
>
>  - The ThreadScope viewer itself, which will also be up on Hackage
>    as soon as its ready.
>
> So we fully intend to get this out there ASAP, although until GHC 6.12 is 
> released you will need to use a GHC snapshot to generate the log files.

Sweet. This should have many many applications for work projects ...
"attach a viewer to a remote Haskell server to see what's it's up to"...
"heartbeat monitoring of the rts" ...

-- Don