Abstract

Despite recent advances, predicting the performance of functional programs on real machines remains something of a black art. This paper reports on one particularly unexpected set of results where small variations in the dynamic heap settings occasionally gave rise to significant differences in CPU performance. These performance spikes can be traced to the direct-mapped cache of the machine being benchmarked, the widely-used Sun Sparcstation 1. 1. Introduction In spite of the recent growth of interest in performance profiling [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] , we are still often surprised by the performance of functional programs on real machines. This paper reports on performance results obtained from a trivial functional program, whose performance we believed to be well understood, but which transpired to be rather subtle. 2. Benchmarking a Simple Program Our benchmark program is a simple implementation of the classic Towers of Hanoi function in Haskell. main resps = [AppendChan stdout (hanoi 15 '...

Citations