ezyang's blog

In-program GC stats redux

Hac Phi was quite productive (since I managed to get two blog posts out of it!) On Saturday I committed a new module GHC.Stats to base which implemented a modified subset of the API I proposed previously. Here is the API; to use it you’ll need to compile GHC from Git. Please test and let me know if things should get changed or clarified!

-- | Global garbage collection and memory statistics.
data GCStats = GCStats
    { bytes_allocated :: Int64 -- ^ Total number of bytes allocated
    , num_gcs :: Int64 -- ^ Number of garbage collections performed
    , max_bytes_used :: Int64 -- ^ Maximum number of live bytes seen so far
    , num_byte_usage_samples :: Int64 -- ^ Number of byte usage samples taken
    -- | Sum of all byte usage samples, can be used with
    -- 'num_byte_usage_samples' to calculate averages with
    -- arbitrary weighting (if you are sampling this record multiple
    -- times).
    , cumulative_bytes_used :: Int64
    , bytes_copied :: Int64 -- ^ Number of bytes copied during GC
    , current_bytes_used :: Int64 -- ^ Current number of live bytes
    , current_bytes_slop :: Int64 -- ^ Current number of bytes lost to slop
    , max_bytes_slop :: Int64 -- ^ Maximum number of bytes lost to slop at any one time so far
    , peak_megabytes_allocated :: Int64 -- ^ Maximum number of megabytes allocated
    -- | CPU time spent running mutator threads.  This does not include
    -- any profiling overhead or initialization.
    , mutator_cpu_seconds :: Double
    -- | Wall clock time spent running mutator threads.  This does not
    -- include initialization.
    , mutator_wall_seconds :: Double
    , gc_cpu_seconds :: Double -- ^ CPU time spent running GC
    , gc_wall_seconds :: Double -- ^ Wall clock time spent running GC
    -- | Number of bytes copied during GC, minus space held by mutable
    -- lists held by the capabilities.  Can be used with
    -- 'par_max_bytes_copied' to determine how well parallel GC utilized
    -- all cores.
    , par_avg_bytes_copied :: Int64
    -- | Sum of number of bytes copied each GC by the most active GC
    -- thread each GC.  The ratio of 'par_avg_bytes_copied' divided by
    -- 'par_max_bytes_copied' approaches 1 for a maximally sequential
    -- run and approaches the number of threads (set by the RTS flag
    -- @-N@) for a maximally parallel run.
    , par_max_bytes_copied :: Int64
    } deriving (Show, Read)

-- | Retrieves garbage collection and memory statistics as of the last
-- garbage collection.  If you would like your statistics as recent as
-- possible, first run a 'performGC' from "System.Mem".
getGCStats :: IO GCStats