Ketil Malde
I've also added results from the 64 bit ghc-6.8.20071011 binary snapshot, which shows some nice improvements, with one benchmark improving by 30%(!).
One difference between these runs is that the ByteString library, on which this particular benchmark depends heavily, got upgraded from fps-0.7 to bytestring-0.9. I initially thought some of the performance increase could be due to that, but after some contortions, I find that 6.6.1 with bytestring-0.9 gives me slightly worse results(!) (I haven't yet entirely convinced myself that I got this properly set up, but at least ghci lets me :m Data.ByteString.Lazy.Internals, which I believe is a new addition) Here are the numbers: --- Sequence bench --- rc hash counts int (8) ..... OK, passed 10 tests, CPU time: 38.778423s rc hash counts int (16) ..... OK, passed 10 tests, CPU time: 38.522408s rc hash counts (16) ..... OK, passed 10 tests, CPU time: 38.694418s rc hash counts (32) ..... OK, passed 10 tests, CPU time: 39.170448s Sequence bench totals, CPU time: 155.165697s, wall clock: 155 secs --- Alignment bench --- global alignment, short ..... OK, passed 10 tests, CPU time: 3.492218s global alignment, long ...... OK, passed 10 tests, CPU time: 152.497531s Alignment bench totals, CPU time: 155.989749s, wall clock: 156 secs Total for all tests, CPU time: 311.155446s, wall clock: 311 secs -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants