3 questions regarding profiling in ghc

[John Dorsey]

Daniil,

While you're waiting for an answer from a GHC internals expert, here's my
experience as a fellow user.

> 1) Can I profile my program if I don't have all the libraries it depends  
> on compiled with profiling?

I don't know how to do that, and I don't know how to automatically reinstall
all dependencies of my project with profiling enabled.  I recently went
through reinstalling said dependencies as I found them, iteratively.  I
could have blown away and reinstalled GHC instead, and saved time.

To prevent a recurrence, I now have this in my ~/.cabal/config :

library-vanilla: True
library-profiling: True

This should install both normal and profiling versions of every library that
I install with cabal from here out.  It's a little slower when installing
new library packages, but it doesn't come up often enough to bother me.
There may be some pain when I get around to bootstrapping GHC 6.12, if
it doesn't install profiling builds of its bundled libs.

> Moreover, as far as I could tell functions from those packages didn't  
> appear in the call graph after +RTS -p profiling.

Did you use "-auto-all", to automatically create cost centers for all
top-level functions?  I find that I get very verbose cost info for
definitions under imported libraries.

> 2) Can I exclude a function from profiling? That probably means not  
> assigning a cost centre to it.

If "-auto-all" doesn't please you, you can manually define your cost centers
in your code, leaving out the ones you don't care about.  But unless I'm
mistaken, that doesn't exclude those costs, but rather includes them in the
calling cost center.  So it may not be what you're asking for.

> Typical case, I think. Database connect function is rather heavyweight  
> (regarding time) compared to the rest of the code, and it takes up to  
> 98% of time. So the rest of the picture is less informative than it  
> could be.

It's your business, but in that case why would you care about the (time)
profile of the rest of the code?  I wouldn't spend ten seconds
time-optimizing anything but that hot spot.  If it can't be improved, you're
done.

To be clear, I'm assuming you're talking about 98% of CPU time, not wall
time; I don't think the profiler reports wall time, except maybe in the
summary.

> 3) Isn't it possible to have -p profiling data of the interrupted  
> (ctrl-c) program?

When I ctrl-c out of my program, I get a nice <program>.prof file in the
directory where it's running.  If you're not getting that, the difference
could be OS environment (I'm developing on Linux), or it could be that I'm
using happstack and calling a routine that catches the ctrl-c then exits
cleanly.  It's Happstack.State.waitForTermination; you can probably distill
enough from it to get the same effect.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/happstack-state/0.3.4/doc/html/src/Happstack-State-Control.html#waitForTermination

(Pardon the long link.)  My main routine spins off threads to do all the
work, and the main thread waits on waitForTermination then shuts down.

Hope some of this helps.

Regards,
John Dorsey