ThreadScope Tour/Profile

Objectives

Examine a ThreadScope profile on a realistic program

Concepts

1. HEC - Haskell Execution Context; basically there is one HEC for each core you enable with the RTS option -N

Steps

1. Build sudoku2 and view its eventlog in ThreadScope

   rm sudoku2
   ghc -O2 sudoku2.hs -threaded -rtsopts -eventlog
   ./sudoku2 sudoku17.1000.txt +RTS -N2 -ls
   threadscope sudoku2.eventlog

2. Examine the activity graph. The dashed horizontal lines provide hints about the amount of activity you might expect. Here for example we are using two cores, which is reflected the line dividing the graph into two pieces.

   

   In the example above, we can see both cores nearly maxed out until around 1.85s at which point the amount of activity drops down to half.

3. To see how this activity is distributed between cores, have a look at the HECs just below.

   

   It so happens that the reason the activity dropped in half is that one of the cores stopped working.

4. Observe the link between activity and garbage collection.

   

Questions and exercises

1. What do you think is causing the uneven division between the 2 cores?
2. If you have more than 2 course available, what happened when you enable them?
3. Try profiling the k-means example and studying the profile.