Joost Behrends wrote:
Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell <at> gmail.com> writes:
If it can be reproduced on anyones machine, it is a bug. If you can
bundle up two programs which don't read from stdin (i.e. no getLine
calls) or the standard arguments (i.e. getArgs) which differ only by
the Data.Char import, and have massive speed difiference, then report
a bug.
You should probably also give your GHC versions and platforms etc.
Thanks for your attention too !
Now i tried a version without input (just computing the primefactors of the
constant 2^61+1, what it did correctly in spite of its bugginess). And it
didn't have the Data.Char bug (and Data.List bug) too.
As my original code hasn't on Linux also it seems.
Thus it happens only in an exotic configuration. Windows will stay exotic
in the Haskell community. Before should noone
has reproduced it at least on Windows (XPpro SP2 is my version), i will do
nothing more.
The hardware is Intel Celeron 2.2GHZ, 512 MB Ram. ghc 6.8.1 lives on
D:\\Programme (not on the system drive C:, which poses problems to Cabal,
told aside).
Even if it only happens on Windows, if it isn't specific to your hardware
then it could still be a bug.
I have seen strange artifacts like this before that turned out to be caused
by one of two things:
- bad cache interactions, e.g. we just happen to have laid out the code in
such a way that frequently accessed code sequences push each other out
of the cache, or the relative position of the heap and stack have a bad
interaction. This happens less frequently these days with 4-way and
8-way associative caches on most CPUs.
- alignment issues, such as storing or loading a lot of misaligned Doubles
in the second case, I've seen the same program run +/- 50% in performance
from run to run, just based on random alignment of the stack. But it's not
likely to be the issue here, I'm guessing. If it is code misalignment,
that's something we can easily fix (but I don't *think* we're doing
anything wrong in that respect).
I have an Opteron box here that regularly gives +/- 20% from run to run of
the same program with no other load on the machine. I have no idea why...
Cheers,
Simon
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