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

Heap profiling


From the profiling report (+RTS -p) we were able to infer how much different cost centres allocated space, along with a rough estimate of time spent in cost centres in total during the program's lifetime. What if we wanted to see how space usage varies across that lifetime? That would be useful to pinpoint space leaks that manifest themselves only at certain events.

GHC includes a heap profiler, which put simply snapshots heap usage at small fixed intervals and generates a time-dependent report in the form of a .hp file. To enable the heap profiler for an executable, the same -prof flag for GHC is enough. Some limited heap profiling is also supported when compiled without profiling. The same cost centres used for time and allocation profiling are also used for heap profiling, if the heap profile is generated or narrowed down based on cost centres.

To extract a heap report, we need to use some of the -h family of Runtime System options. Those options are as follows:

-h<break...