[Haskell-cafe] When is a bug GHC's fault/strange STM behaviour

Carter Schonwald carter.schonwald at gmail.com
Sat Mar 13 16:04:06 EST 2010


is it possibly something related to how the  gc interacts with that many
threads in that context?

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Michael Lesniak <mlesniak at uni-kassel.de>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> In one of my example programs I have a strange behaviour: it is a very
> simple taskpool using STM; in pseudocode it's
>
> 1. generate data structures
> 2. initialize data structures
> 3. fork threads
> 4. wait (using STM) until the pool is empty and all threads are finished
> 5. print a final message
>
> In very few cases, which depend on the number of threads spawned, the
> program hangs *after* the final message of step 5 has been printed.
> "Few cases" means, for example, 50.000 good, terminating runs before
> it hangs. If you increment the number of spawned threads (to a few
> hundred or thousands), it hangs much faster. Since forked threads
> terminate after the main thread terminates (which it should after
> printing the message), this behaviour is quite unexpected.
>
> Since I've experienced strange behaviour in the past which was the
> fault of my system configuration[1], I am a bit cautious before
> reporting a bug on GHC's bugtracker, especially since its reproduction
> is so difficult and random.
>
> So my question is how much circumspection is expected/needed before
> one should enter a bug in the bug tracker? I've tested the attached
> code on three different systems (with different linux systems, but
> always GHC 6.12.1 (since it's a bit costly to install the older
> versions)) and observed the mentioned behaviour. Is this enough to
> justify a bug report? Or, on the other hand, could someone spot the
> error in the attached code. Given my history with strange parallel
> behaviour, I am much more sure that it's the fault of my code, but I
> can't spot the error and the described behaviour (halting *after* the
> final message) is really strange.
>
>
> Cheers,
>  Michael
>
> [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-March/073938.html
>
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