Am Dienstag 16 Februar 2010 15:45:38 schrieb Jean-Marie Gaillourdet:
Warning: speculation ahead, but is based on my knowledge on other profilers.
Many profilers work statistically, they interrupt a program at more less random (or equal) intervals and inspect the stack, whick is of course quite difficult in Haskell as far as I understand it. I have interpreted the entries column as an indication for the amount of "profile interrupts" which happened when a function f was on top of the stack, whatever that means in Haskell.
The manual of GHC 6.10.4, chapter 5 states:
The actual meaning of the various columns in the output is:
entries
The number of times this particular point in the call graph was entered.
So for me the question remains open, is "entries" a precisely counted value or a statistically determined one?
I have one observation that supports "precisely counted", namely, while the time spent in each cost centre (number of ticks) varies between profiling runs of the same code, the number of bytes allocated and the number of entries remain the same. It's far from conclusive, though. Anybody willing to dig into the profiler code? 8-)
Best regards, Jean
Cheers, Daniel