Re: [Haskell-cafe] Space leak - help needed

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 12:34:38PM -0700, Justin Bailey wrote:

The stack blows up when a bunch of unevaluated thunks build up, and you try to evaluate them. One way to determine where those thunks are getting built is to use GHCs "retainer" profiling. Retainer sets will show you the "call stack" that is holding on to memory. That can give you a clue where these thunks are being created. To get finer-grained results, annotate your code with {#- SCC "..." #-} pragmas. Then you can filter the retainer profile by those annotations. That will help you determine where in a given function the thunks are being created.

If you need help with profiling basics, feel free to ask.

I'm not entirely sure if I understand retainer profiling correctly... So please clarify if you spot any obvious blunders. Retainers are thunks or objects on stack that keep references to live objects. All retainers of an object are called the object's retainer set. Now when one makes a profiling run, say with ./jobname +RTS -p -hr, the graph refernces retainer sets from jobname.prof. My understanding is that it is the total size of all objects retained by retainer sets being plotted, correct? About decoding the sets from jobname.prof - for example in

SET 2 = {} SET 16 = {, } SET 18 = {, }

{...} means it's a set, and is the retainer cost centre (ccN) and hierarchy of parent cost centres up to the "top level" (cc0)? My understanding is that SET 18 above refers to objects that are retained by exactly two specified cost centres, right? Finally, what is the MAIN.SYSTEM retainer? Thanks in advance, -- Krzysztof Kościuszkiewicz Skype: dr.vee, Gadu: 111851, Jabber: kokr@jabberpl.org "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" -- Leonardo da Vinci