More space leaks: Alex/Happy edition

Summary: Alex and Happy had three space leaks, now fixed.

Using the techniques described in my previous blog post I checked happy and alex for space leaks. As expected, both had space leaks. Three were clear and unambiguous space leaks, two were more nuanced. In this post I'll describe all five, starting with the obvious ones.

1: Happy - non-strict accumulating fold

Happy contains the code:

indexInto :: Eq a => Int -> a -> [a] -> Maybe Int
indexInto _ _ []                 = Nothing
indexInto i x (y:ys) | x == y    = Just i
                     | otherwise = indexInto (i+1) x ys

This code finds the index of an element in a list, always being first called with an initial argument of 0. However, as it stands, the first argument is a classic space leak - it chews through the input list, building up an equally long chain of +1 applications, which are only forced later.

The fix is simple, change the final line to:

let j = i + 1 in j `seq` indexInto j x ys

Or (preferably) switch to using the space-leak free Data.List.elemIndex. Fixed in a pull request.

2: Happy - sum using foldr

Happy also contained the code:

foldr (\(a,b) (c,d) -> (a+b,b+d)) (0,0) conflictList

The first issue is that the code is using foldr to produce a small atomic value, when foldl' would be a much better choice. Even after switching to foldl' we still have a space leak because foldl' only forces the outer-most value - namely just the pair, not the Int values inside. We want to force the elements inside the pair so are forced into the more painful construction:

foldl' (\(a,b) (c,d) ->
    let ac = a + c; bd = b + d
    in ac `seq` bd `seq` (ac,bd))
    (0,0) conflictList

Not as pleasant, but it does work. In some cases people may prefer to define the auxiliary:

let strict2 f !x !y = f x y
in foldr (\(a,b) (c,d) -> strict2 (,) (a+b) (b+d)) (0,0) conflictList

Fixed in a pull request.

3: Alex - lazy state in a State Monad

Alex features the code:

N $ \s n _ -> (s, addEdge n, ())

Here N roughly corresponds to a state monad with 2 fields, s and n. In this code n is a Map, which operates strictly, but the n itself is not forced until the end. We solve the problem by forcing the value before returning the triple:

N $ \s n _ -> let n' = addEdge n in n' `seq` (s, n', ())

Fixed in a pull request.

4: Alex - array freeze

Alex calls the Data.Array.MArray.freeze function, to convert an STUArray (unboxed mutable array in the ST monad) into a UArray (unboxed immutable array). Unfortunately the freeze call in the array library uses an amount of stack proportional to the size of the array. Not necessarily a space leak, but not ideal either. Looking at the code, it's also very inefficient, constructing and deconstructing lots of intermediate data. Fortunately under normal optimisation a rewrite rule fires for this type to replace the call with one to freezeSTUArray, which is much faster and has bounded stack, but is not directly exported.

Usually I diagnose space leaks under -O0, on the basis that any space leak problems at -O0 may eventually cause problems anyway if an optimisation opportunity is lost. In this particular case I had to -O1 that module.

5: Happy - complex fold

The final issue occurs in a function fold_lookahead, which when given lists of triples does an mconcat on all values that match in the first two components. Using the extra library that can be written as:

map (\((a,b),cs) -> (a,b,mconcat cs)) .
groupSort .
map (\(a,b,c) -> ((a,b),c))

We first turn the triple into a pair where the first two elements are the first component of the pair, call groupSort, then mconcat the result. However, in Happy this construction is encoded as a foldr doing an insertion sort on the first component, followed by a linear scan on the second component, then individual mappend calls. The foldr construction uses lots of stack (more than 1Mb), and also uses an O(n^2) algorithm instead of O(n log n).

Alas, the algorithms are not identical - the resulting list is typically in a different order. I don't believe this difference matters, and the tests all pass, but it does make the change more dangerous than the others. Fixed in a pull request.

The result

Thanks to Simon Marlow for reviewing and merging all the changes. After these changes Happy and Alex on the sample files I tested them with use < 1Kb of stack. In practice the space leaks discovered here are unlikely to materially impact any real workflows, but they probably go a bit faster.