Re: [Haskell-cafe] ghc leaking memory?

Hi Simon, Am Montag, den 08.03.2010, 11:07 +0000 schrieb Simon Marlow:

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On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Joachim Breitner wrote:

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Hi,

in Debian, we are having some problems building large libraries (such as agda, highlighting-kate, xmonad-contrib) on weaker architectures (sparc, armel, s390) which compile with -fvia-C, especially when building the profiling libraries.

In the case of highlighting-kate, there were really issues with the code: A huge list of words which ghc seemed to try to inline caused it consuming a lot of memory.

But in the case of agda, it even fails with relatively small modules: https://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi?pkg=agda&arch=sparc&ver=2.2.6-3&stamp=1267334936&file=log&as=raw

Now, looking at the memory gauge on my computer while compiling such a program with Cabal (which compiles all modules in one ghc call), it looks like it is steadily increasing. I’d expect ghc to free a lot of memory when it is done with a module, but this does not seem to be the case.

Is this a bug (i.e. memory leak) in ghc or expected behavior?

Can you verify that it is GHC leaking memory, and not gcc? I recommend turning off -fvia-C in particular unless you're sure that you need it.

Sorry if I was not clear: The issues arise on “strange” architectures (armel, s390, sparc, mips) where, as far as I know, -fvia-C is the only option and thus the default. I was not setting this flag myself. Isn’t GHC calling gcc once for each module? In that case, that can not leak across modules, can it? Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata