Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By : Samuli Thomasson
Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By: Samuli Thomasson

Overview of this book

Haskell, with its power to optimize the code and its high performance, is a natural candidate for high performance programming. It is especially well suited to stacking abstractions high with a relatively low performance cost. This book addresses the challenges of writing efficient code with lazy evaluation and techniques often used to optimize the performance of Haskell programs. We open with an in-depth look at the evaluation of Haskell expressions and discuss optimization and benchmarking. You will learn to use parallelism and we'll explore the concept of streaming. We’ll demonstrate the benefits of running multithreaded and concurrent applications. Next we’ll guide you through various profiling tools that will help you identify performance issues in your program. We’ll end our journey by looking at GPGPU, Cloud and Functional Reactive Programming in Haskell. At the very end there is a catalogue of robust library recommendations with code samples. By the end of the book, you will be able to boost the performance of any app and prepare it to stand up to real-world punishment.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Haskell High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Profile and monitor in real time


The heap profile report file <program>.hp is generated as the program executes, so it's perfectly fine to take a snapshot of the file at any time and visualize it with hp2ps, even if the program is still busy executing. Because very basic heap profiling (-hT) is possible without having compiled with profiling support, it is possible to produce running heap profiles with a very small overhead.

Increasing the sample interval -i to something relatively big, such as a couple of seconds, it is very feasible to extract heap profiles from long-running programs even in production environments.

A quick-and-dirty trick that isn't for the light-hearted is the -S Runtime System option. This option prints garbage collector statistics every time a cleanup takes place, in realtime. This includes bytes allocated, bytes copied, bytes live, time elapsed, and how long the garbage collector took. To make some sense of the output, it might make sense to limit the number of...