Simon Marlow
Malcolm Wallace wrote:
For the only application I tried, using the threaded RTS imposes a 100% performance penalty - i.e. computation time doubles, compared to the non-threaded RTS. This was with ghc-6.8.2, and maybe the overhead has improved since then?
This is a guess, but I wonder if this program is concurrent, and does a lot of communication between the main thread and other threads?
Exactly so - it hits the worst case behaviour. This was a naive attempt to parallelise an algorithm by shifting some work onto a spare processor. Unfortunately, there is a lot of communication to the main thread, because the work that was shifted elsewhere computes a large data structure in chunks, and passes those chunks back. The main thread then runs OpenGL calls using this data -- and I believe OpenGL calls must run in a bound thread. This all suggests that one consequence of ghc's RTS implementation choices is that it will never be cheap to compute visualization data in parallel with rendering it in OpenGL. That would be a shame. This was exactly the parallelism I was hoping for. Regards, Malcolm