Another question: The profiling mode of GHC-4.08.2 did also output (in mode +RTS -p) the time spent on garbage collection (as an additional percentage of overall running time). With the programs I tested so far under GHC-5.04.1, I never saw such an indication in a.out.prof, although for the same programs under GHC-4.08.2 considerable garbage collection times were measured.
Does this mean that:
a) the indication of garbage collection times has been dropped from profiling reports (can I obtain them in another way?),
or
b) the newer GHC is so smart that it optimised away the need for garbage collection in the particular (few) programs I tested, but otherwise the GC times will show up in profiling reports,
or
c) something else?
The inclusion of GC time in the report was wrong, since GC time wasn't included in the figure for total time, so you could get GC times of > 100%. You can get a measure of GC time vs. mutator time by adding '+RTS -sstderr' to the command line. Cheers, Simon