[Haskell-cafe] Concurrency and ghc 6.12.3

[Ketil Malde]

Hi,

On experimenting with concurrency, I got somewhat surprising result.  I
have a program ('flower') that reads an input file and generates one or
more output files.  As the different output files are independent, I
construct one IO action for each output requested on the command line,
and just forkIO one thread for each.  This seems to work fairly well on one
CPU, so I decided to try on multiple CPUs, using +RTS -N.  To my
surprise, this made the program take several times longer (wall clock).

So I tried -N2 and -N4 to see how that turned out. Results are, in
minutes: 

format     def   -N2   -N4   -N
  i         0     0     0     0
  q         2     2     2    13
  f         2     5     1    14
  h         8    10     2    27
  s        26    17    11     -
  T        37    23    16     -
  F        47    38    42     -

CPU      2543u 3027u (lost)   -
           36s  593s
           92%  161%       

I had to terminate -N after five hours wall time and 158026.68s user 60682.76s
system 1210% CPU.

So, well, it seems this scales okay as long as there are enough threads,
but scales *horribly* when you run more threads than processes.  Is this
a correct assessment?  Would it make sense to simply cap -N to the
number of forked threads?  I guess I should try this with GHC7, but is there
reason to believe it will perform better?

-k
--  
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants