
Hello, In one of my example programs I have a strange behaviour: it is a very simple taskpool using STM; in pseudocode it's 1. generate data structures 2. initialize data structures 3. fork threads 4. wait (using STM) until the pool is empty and all threads are finished 5. print a final message In very few cases, which depend on the number of threads spawned, the program hangs *after* the final message of step 5 has been printed. "Few cases" means, for example, 50.000 good, terminating runs before it hangs. If you increment the number of spawned threads (to a few hundred or thousands), it hangs much faster. Since forked threads terminate after the main thread terminates (which it should after printing the message), this behaviour is quite unexpected. Since I've experienced strange behaviour in the past which was the fault of my system configuration[1], I am a bit cautious before reporting a bug on GHC's bugtracker, especially since its reproduction is so difficult and random. So my question is how much circumspection is expected/needed before one should enter a bug in the bug tracker? I've tested the attached code on three different systems (with different linux systems, but always GHC 6.12.1 (since it's a bit costly to install the older versions)) and observed the mentioned behaviour. Is this enough to justify a bug report? Or, on the other hand, could someone spot the error in the attached code. Given my history with strange parallel behaviour, I am much more sure that it's the fault of my code, but I can't spot the error and the described behaviour (halting *after* the final message) is really strange. Addendum: Daniel Fischer could reproduce the problem and pointed out[2], that making the evaluation of the TVAR's value strict does not reproduce the behaviour. This is even stranger in this context; I don't see, how lazy evaluation can change the behaviour of my code. Cheers, Michael [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-March/073938.html [2] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-March/074520.html -- Dipl.-Inf. Michael C. Lesniak University of Kassel Programming Languages / Methodologies Research Group Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Wilhelmshöher Allee 73 34121 Kassel Phone: +49-(0)561-804-6269