To avoid retaining a large lazy data structure in memory it is useful to hide it behind a function call. Below, "many" is used twice. It is hidden behind a function call so it can be garbage collected between uses. That's good. When compiling with "-O" it seems that GHC 7.4.1 decides to keep it in memory anyway. That's bad. (I can't read core so I don't know exactly what's going on). Replacing one of the "many" in "twice" with "different_many" makes everything fine again. Is this considered a bug in GHC? Is it a known bug? It is incredibly concerning that GHC would perform this kind of pessimisation. Tom % cat thunkfail.hs {-# OPTIONS_GHC -fno-warn-unused-binds #-} import Data.List million :: Int million = 10 ^ (6 :: Int) many :: () -> [Int] many () = [1..million] different_many :: () -> [Int] different_many () = [1..million] twice :: (Int, Int) twice = (foldl' (+) 0 (many ()), foldl' (+) 0 (many ())) main :: IO () main = print twice % ghc -fforce-recomp -Wall -Werror -rtsopts thunkfail.hs && ./thunkfail +RTS -M5M [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( thunkfail.hs, thunkfail.o ) Linking thunkfail ... (1784293664,1784293664) % ghc -O -fforce-recomp -Wall -Werror -rtsopts thunkfail.hs && ./thunkfail +RTS -M5M [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( thunkfail.hs, thunkfail.o ) Linking thunkfail ... Heap exhausted; Current maximum heap size is 5242880 bytes (5 MB); use `+RTS -M<size>' to increase it.