#8224: Excessive system time -- new IO manager problem? -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: rrnewton | Owner: Type: bug | Status: new Priority: high | Milestone: 7.8.1 Component: Runtime System | Version: 7.7 Keywords: IO Manager, | Operating System: Linux System Time | Type of failure: Runtime Architecture: x86_64 (amd64) | performance bug Difficulty: Unknown | Test Case: Blocked By: | Blocking: Related Tickets: | -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- This is an issue that came to light when testing the patches on #910. You can see some of the numbers there. Basically, recent GHC HEAD builds, running a large number of threads blocked on MVars will result in burning a lot of system time. The attached file provides a mediocre reproducer. With it, you can see that building with HEAD as of Aug 31st and running with `-RTS -N32` will result in around 200ms system time, whereas GHC 7.6.3 spends about 30ms in system time. This shows the disparity, but the result is not that egregious. A more noticeable example is on ticket #910, where when running on 31 threads, there is an 8 minutes of system time for 17 minutes of user time, and yet at one thread that system time drops to under two seconds! {{{ 1 thread: real 1m20.028s user 1m17.921s sys 0m1.768s 31 threads: real 1m27.445s user 17m0.314s sys 8m0.175s }}} It needs to be determined whether this system time is a result of the parallel compilation patches on #910, or whether it is a new problem with the runtime system, and in particular with the parallel IO manager. I am inclined to believe that compiling in parallel involves extra IO (repeatedly reading interface files?), but not eight minutes of it!! -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8224 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler