[Haskell-cafe] debugging space leaks in references

[Andrew Pimlott]

GHC's great space profiling tools don't appear to be much help when your
leaked memory is stored in references (IORefs, StablePtrs, etc).  I had
a real-life case where the allocation profile showed me where the leaked
data came from, and I could guess that it was being held by some
reference, but I couldn't tell which one.  Retainer set profiling showed
a big suspicious entry for "SYSTEM", but I couldn't find any way to
pinpoint the problem.  (It ended up being a missing freeStablePtr in
hsgnutls, found by code inspection.)

Here's a contrived example that just allocates a bunch of IORefs:

    import Control.Monad
    import Data.IORef

    main = repeatM (newIORef [1,2,3])
    repeatM io = liftM2 (:) io (repeatM io)

Retainer set profiling shows everything in "SYSTEM".  None of the other
profiling methods say anything interesting either.  What I'd like to
get, I think, is (1) your memory is being held in IORefs (2) allocated
by this cost center and (3) being retained by this cost center.  I guess
I'm looking for something like a memory profiler for a traditional
language.  But I haven't really thought it all out (and I don't even
understand everything the existing profiles tell me).

Are there some tricks I've missed for this sort of debugging?  And
perchance would this be an interesting GHC hackathon subject?

Andrew