Hi With the discussion on threads and priority, and given that (in Stats.c) there are lots of useful pieces of information that the run time system is collecting, some of which is already visible (like the total amount of memory mutated) and it is easy to make other measures available - it has raised this question in my mind: Given that you have access to that information (the stuff that comes out at the end of a run if you use +RTS -S) is it possible to estimate the time a GC will take before asking for one? Ignoring, at least for the moment, all the issues of paging, processor cache occupancy etc, what are the complexity drivers for the time to GC? I realise that it is going to depend on things like, volume of data mutated, count of objects mutated, what fraction of them are live etc - and even if it turns out that these things are very program specific then I have a follow-on question - what properties do you need from your program to be able to construct a viable estimate of GC time from a past history of such garbage collections? Why am I interested? There are all manners of 'real time' in systems, there is a vast class where a statistical bound (ie some sort of 'time to complete' CDF) is more than adequate for production use. If this is possible then it opens up areas where all the lovely properties of haskell can be exploited if only you had confidence in the timing behaviour. Cheers Neil