So recently I've been having issues with Data.Binary & Data.Sequence; I serialize a 'Seq String' You can see the file here: http://code.haskell.org/yi/Yi/IReader.hs The relevant function seems to be: -- | Read in database from 'dbLocation' and then parse it into an 'ArticleDB'. readDB :: YiM ArticleDB readDB = io $ (dbLocation >>= r) `catch` (\_ -> return empty) where r x = fmap (decode . BL.fromChunks . return) $ B.readFile x -- We read in with strict bytestrings to guarantee the file is closed, -- and then we convert it to the lazy bytestring data.binary expects. -- This is inefficient, but alas... My current serialized file is about 9.4M. I originally thought that the issue might be the recent upgrade in Yi to binary 0.5, but I unpulled patches back to past that, and the problem still manifested. Whenever yi tries to read the articles.db file, it stack overflows. It actually stack-overflowed on even smaller files, but I managed to bump the size upwards, it seems, by the strict-Bytestring trick. Unfortunately, my personal file has since passed whatever that limit was. I've read carefully the previous threads on Data.Binary and Data.Map stack-overflows, but none of them seem to help; hacking some $!s or seqs into readDB seems to make no difference, and Seq is supposed to be a strict datastructure already! Doing things in GHCi has been tedious, and hasn't enlightened me much: sometimes things overflow and sometimes they don't. It's all very frustrating and I'm seriously considering going back to using the original read/show code unless anyone knows how to fix this - that approach may be many times slower, but I know it will work. -- gwern