Profiling burn-rate

Sengan senganb@ia.nsc.com
Fri, 06 Apr 2001 17:36:24 -0400


Is there any way to profile the "burn-rate" of a Haskell program?

Profiling as I understand it tells you what the "live" information
on the heap is. It doesn't tell you what garbage collector has just
freed. So, if a function were generating tons of intermediate values
which it then immediately consumed, you wouldn't see it on the profile.
Yet this is a place where rewriting the code or adding strictness could
help reduce time spent garbage collecting.

I liken this to cash-flow: you're not just interested in the amount of
cash you have, but also where it's going. Profiling currently gives us
only the first dimension not the second, if I understand it correctly.

Sengan