Profiling Memory Usage With eventlog2html and ghc-debug
You are most welcome to join us for this live tutorial.
Abstract:
Understanding and analysing the memory usage of Haskell programs is a notoriously difficult yet important problem. Recent improvements to GHC’s profiling capabilities, along with better tooling, has made it much easier to deeply and precisely analyse the memory usage characteristics of even large Haskell programs.
This workshop aims to present two such tools that allow high and low level memory usage analysis of Haskell programs: eventlog2html and ghc-debug. We will learn how to set up and use eventlog2html to generate high-level visuals and statistics of our program’s execution. We will also learn how to set up and use ghc-debug to precisely and programmatically explore our program’s low-level memory usage profile.
We will examine these tools by using them on several pre-prepared Haskell programs. The workshop aims to be beneficial to Haskell programmers of all levels. Beginner Haskell programmers can expect to gain a deeper understanding of lazy evaluation and the impacts it can have on program performance. Experienced Haskell programmers can expect to gain an understanding of exactly what these tools have to offer and the skills necessary to use these tools on their own Haskell programs.