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Enabling profiling can significantly change the space behavior of programs. There may be some important optimizations that don't occur in the presence of profiling, and the profiling data itself takes some memory. I have to admit, I don't know a lot about GHC profiling so I'm afraid I can't be of much help.

Me neither. I tried several things: Just turning off the optimizations doesn't cause the problem. Optimization + profiling (-O -prof) has the same problem as -prof alone. It doesn't matter if -auto-all option is there or not. And the profiled program gobbles up all memory with or without the +RTS -p option.

Furthermore, the problem has nothing to do with Edison. The version 6.4.2 of ghc is the culprit. I hadn't run the profiler since I upgraded to 6.4.2 until now. But now when I compile with 6.4.2 the old version of the program, using Data.Map, I see the same behavior as with PatriciaLoMap: the program diverges and eats all available memory. I thought it could be the GCC 4.1.1 which was also a recent upgrade, but the behavior is the same with -prof -fasm options. So I guess it must be ghc. Did anybody else encounter this problem?