memory fragmentation with ghc-7.6.1

[Simon Marlow]

On 21/09/2012 04:07, John Lato wrote:
> Yes, that's my current understanding.  I see this with ByteString and
> Data.Vector.Storable, but not
> Data.Vector/Data.Vector.Unboxed/Data.Text.  As ByteStrings are pretty
> widely used for IO, I expected that somebody else would have
> experienced this too.
>
> I would expect some memory fragmentation with pinned memory, but the
> change from ghc-7.4 to ghc-7.6 is rather extreme (no fragmentation to
> several GB).

This was a side-effect of the improvements we made to the allocation of 
pinned objects, which ironically was made to avoid fragmentation of a 
different kind.  What is happening is that the memory for the pinned 
objects is now taken from the nursery, and so the nursery has to be 
replenished after GC.  When we allocate memory for the nursery we like 
to allocate it in big contiguous chunks, because that works better with 
automatic prefecthing, but the memory is horribly fragmented due to all 
the pinned objects, so the large allocation has to be satisfied from the OS.

The fix is not to allocate large chunks for the nursery unless there are 
no small chunks to use up, so I've implemented that.

Happily I also found two other bugs while looking for this one, one of 
which was a performance bug which caused this benchmark to run 10x 
slower than it should have been!  The other bug was a recent regression 
causing it to misreport the amount of allocated memory.

Thanks for the report.

Cheers,
	Simon



> John L.
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Carter Schonwald
> <carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So the problem is only with the data structures on the heap that are pinned
>> in place to play nice with C?
>>
>> I'd be curious to understand the change too, though per se pinned memory (a
>> la storable or or bytestring) will by definition cause memory fragmentation
>> in a gc'd lang as a rule,  (or at least one like Haskell).
>> -Carter
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 8:59 PM, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> We've noticed that some applications exhibit significantly worse
>>> memory usage when compiled with ghc-7.6.1 compared to ghc-7.4, leading
>>> to out of memory errors in some cases.  Running one app with +RTS -s,
>>> I see this:
>>>
>>> ghc-7.4
>>>   525,451,699,736 bytes allocated in the heap
>>>    53,404,833,048 bytes copied during GC
>>>        39,097,600 bytes maximum residency (2439 sample(s))
>>>         1,547,040 bytes maximum slop
>>>               628 MB total memory in use (0 MB lost due to fragmentation)
>>>
>>> ghc-7.6
>>> 512,535,907,752 bytes allocated in the heap
>>>    53,327,184,712 bytes copied during GC
>>>        40,038,584 bytes maximum residency (2391 sample(s))
>>>         1,456,472 bytes maximum slop
>>>              3414 MB total memory in use (2744 MB lost due to
>>> fragmentation)
>>>
>>> The total memory in use (consistent with 'top's output) is much higher
>>> when built with ghc-7.6, due entirely to fragmentation.
>>>
>>> I've filed a bug report
>>> (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7257,
>>> http://hpaste.org/74987), but I was wondering if anyone else has
>>> noticed this?  I'm not entirely sure what's triggering this behavior
>>> (some applications work fine), although I suspect it has to do with
>>> allocation of pinned memory.
>>>
>>> John L.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
>>> Glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
>>
>>
>
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