[Haskell-cafe] ghc leaking memory?

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi Simon,

Am Montag, den 08.03.2010, 11:07 +0000 schrieb Simon Marlow:
> > On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Joachim Breitner<nomeata at debian.org>  wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> in Debian, we are having some problems building large libraries (such as
> >> agda, highlighting-kate, xmonad-contrib) on weaker architectures (sparc,
> >> armel, s390) which compile with -fvia-C, especially when building the
> >> profiling libraries.
> >>
> >> In the case of highlighting-kate, there were really issues with the
> >> code: A huge list of words which ghc seemed to try to inline caused it
> >> consuming a lot of memory.
> >>
> >> But in the case of agda, it even fails with relatively small modules:
> >> https://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi?pkg=agda&arch=sparc&ver=2.2.6-3&stamp=1267334936&file=log&as=raw
> >>
> >> Now, looking at the memory gauge on my computer while compiling such a
> >> program with Cabal (which compiles all modules in one ghc call), it
> >> looks like it is steadily increasing. I’d expect ghc to free a lot of
> >> memory when it is done with a module, but this does not seem to be the
> >> case.
> >>
> >> Is this a bug (i.e. memory leak) in ghc or expected behavior?
> 
> Can you verify that it is GHC leaking memory, and not gcc?  I recommend 
> turning off -fvia-C in particular unless you're sure that you need it.

Sorry if I was not clear: The issues arise on “strange” architectures
(armel, s390, sparc, mips) where, as far as I know, -fvia-C is the only
option and thus the default. I was not setting this flag myself.

Isn’t GHC calling gcc once for each module? In that case, that can not
leak across modules, can it?

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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