[Haskell-cafe] Re: Real-time garbage collection for Haskell

[Curt Sampson]

On 2010-03-06 12:42 +0000 (Sat), Simon Marlow wrote:

> Usually I find keeping the nursery size (-A) close to the L2 cache size  
> works best, although sometimes making it really big can be even better.

Interesting to know. I got the impression that I was being encouraged to
keep -A closer to the L1 cache size, myself.

> -qg disables parallel GC completely.  This is usually terrible for  
> locality, because every GC will move all the recently allocated data  
> from each CPU's L2 cache into the cache of the CPU doing GC, where it  
> will have to be fetched out again after GC.

I've since explained to Cranshaw (we are getting to have *way* too many
'Simon's around here) about the issues with our different machines; some
of this depends on the host on which we're doing the testing.

    * Our Core i7 hosts share 8 MB of L3 cache amongst four cores with
    two threads each. Thus, no locality penalties here.

    * Our Xeon E5420 host has two 4-core CPUs, and each pair of cores
    shares a 6 MB L2 cache. Thus there's a pretty good chance that
    something you need is in someone else's cache. I don't know if
    there's any difference between moving stuff between two caches on
    the same CPU and two caches on different CPUs.

    * Our Xeon E5520 host has two 4-core CPUs, each core of which has
    two threads. Each CPU (4 cores) shares an 8 MB L3 cache. Thus,
    presumably, less locality penalty than the E5420 but more than an
    i7. As a side note, I also see slightly less memory bandwidth on
    this system (for both caches and main memory) than I do on an i7.

This gets complex pretty fast. And don't ask me about Intel's new style
of having L1 and L3 or L2 and L3 caches rather than L1 and L2 caches.

> -qb disables load-balancing in the parallel GC, which improves locality  
> at the expense of parallelism, usually I find it is an improvement in  
> parallel programs.

I'd think so too. Figuring out what went on here is going to have to
wait until I get more detailed GC information in the eventlog.

Followups to glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs at cynic.net>         +81 90 7737 2974
             http://www.starling-software.com
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it.    --George Bernard Shaw