On 13/12/2010 15:45, Peter Simons wrote:
Hi Mathieu,
Why don't you use ulimit for this job?
$ ulimit -m 32M; ./cpsa
yes, I was thinking the same thing. Relying exclusively on GHC's ability to limit run-time memory consumption feels like an odd choice for this task. It's nice that this feature exists in GHC, but it's inherently non-portable and outside of the scope of the language. There really ought to be a better way to catch an infinite loop that this.
ulimit is a good way to catch an infinite loop. But it's not a good way to tell GHC how much memory you want to use - if GHC knows the memory limit, then it can make much more intelligent decisions about how to manage memory. The -M flag causes the GC algorithm to switch from copying (fast but hungry) to compaction (slow but frugal) as the limit approaches. Cheers, Simon