I took the parallel merge sort described here: http://martin.sulzmann.googlepages.com/AMP-Spring2008-intro.pdf and added a simple test: main :: IO () main = do putStrLn $ show $ sum $ mergesort $ [sin x | x <- [1.0 .. 1000000.0]] Compiled it with GHC 6.8.2 from Debian testing and ran it with various +RTS -N<n> arguments to measure its performance and obtained the following results on an 8 core: $ ghc --make -O2 -threaded mergesort.hs -o mergesort [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( mergesort.hs, mergesort.o ) Linking mergesort ... $ time ./mergesort +RTS -N1 -0.117109518058233 real 0m9.723s user 0m9.461s sys 0m0.232s $ time ./mergesort +RTS -N2 -0.117109518058233 real 0m13.574s user 0m15.225s sys 0m0.140s $ time ./mergesort +RTS -N3 -0.117109518058233 real 0m13.185s user 0m15.529s sys 0m0.184s $ time ./mergesort +RTS -N4 -0.117109518058233 real 0m13.251s user 0m15.829s sys 0m0.336s $ time ./mergesort +RTS -N5 -0.117109518058233 real 0m13.093s user 0m16.929s sys 0m0.164s $ time ./mergesort +RTS -N6 Segmentation fault real 0m5.711s user 0m7.408s sys 0m0.136s That segfault must be due to a bug in GHC so I thought perhaps a newer version of GHC might fix the segfault but I installed GHC 6.10.4 from Sid and now I get: $ ghc --make -O2 -threaded mergesort.hs -o mergesort Binary: Int64 truncated to fit in 32 bit Int ghc: panic! (the 'impossible' happened) (GHC version 6.10.4 for i386-unknown-linux): Prelude.chr: bad argument Please report this as a GHC bug: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug I'll try the haskell-platform package next. Are these known problems? -- Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e