Heap overflow in Haskell - haskell

Question

I'm getting Heap exhausted message when running the following short Haskell program on a big enough dataset. For example, the program fails (with heap overflow) on 20 Mb input file with around 900k lines. The heap size was set (through -with-rtsopts) to 1 Gb. It runs ok if longestCommonSubstrB is defined as something simpler, e.g. commonPrefix. I need to process files in the order of 100 Mb.
I compiled the program with the following command line (GHC 7.8.3):
ghc -Wall -O2 -prof -fprof-auto "-with-rtsopts=-M512M -p -s -h -i0.1" SampleB.hs
I would appreciate any help in making this thing run in a reasonable amount of space (in the order of the input file size), but I would especially appreciate the thought process of finding where the bottleneck is and where and how to force the strictness.
My guess is that somehow forcing longestCommonSubstrB function to evaluate strictly would solve the problem, but I don't know how to do that.
{-# LANGUAGE BangPatterns #-}
module Main where
import System.Environment (getArgs)
import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as B
import Data.List (maximumBy, sort)
import Data.Function (on)
import Data.Char (isSpace)
-- | Returns a list of lexicon items, i.e. [[w1,w2,w3]]
readLexicon :: FilePath -> IO [[B.ByteString]]
readLexicon filename = do
text <- B.readFile filename
return $ map (B.split '\t' . stripR) . B.lines $ text
where
stripR = B.reverse . B.dropWhile isSpace . B.reverse
transformOne :: [B.ByteString] -> B.ByteString
transformOne (w1:w2:w3:[]) =
B.intercalate (B.pack "|") [w1, longestCommonSubstrB w2 w1, w3]
transformOne a = error $ "transformOne: unexpected tuple " ++ show a
longestCommonSubstrB :: B.ByteString -> B.ByteString -> B.ByteString
longestCommonSubstrB xs ys = maximumBy (compare `on` B.length) . concat $
[f xs' ys | xs' <- B.tails xs] ++
[f xs ys' | ys' <- tail $ B.tails ys]
where f xs' ys' = scanl g B.empty $ B.zip xs' ys'
g z (x, y) = if x == y
then z `B.snoc` x
else B.empty
main :: IO ()
main = do
(input:output:_) <- getArgs
lexicon <- readLexicon input
let flattened = B.unlines . sort . map transformOne $ lexicon
B.writeFile output flattened
This is the profile ouput for the test dataset (100k lines, heap size set to 1 GB, i.e. generateSample.exe 100000, the resulting file size is 2.38 MB):
Heap profile over time:
Execution statistics:
3,505,737,588 bytes allocated in the heap
785,283,180 bytes copied during GC
62,390,372 bytes maximum residency (44 sample(s))
216,592 bytes maximum slop
96 MB total memory in use (0 MB lost due to fragmentation)
Tot time (elapsed) Avg pause Max pause
Gen 0 6697 colls, 0 par 1.05s 1.03s 0.0002s 0.0013s
Gen 1 44 colls, 0 par 4.14s 3.99s 0.0906s 0.1935s
INIT time 0.00s ( 0.00s elapsed)
MUT time 7.80s ( 9.17s elapsed)
GC time 3.75s ( 3.67s elapsed)
RP time 0.00s ( 0.00s elapsed)
PROF time 1.44s ( 1.35s elapsed)
EXIT time 0.02s ( 0.00s elapsed)
Total time 13.02s ( 12.85s elapsed)
%GC time 28.8% (28.6% elapsed)
Alloc rate 449,633,678 bytes per MUT second
Productivity 60.1% of total user, 60.9% of total elapsed
Time and Allocation Profiling Report:
SampleB.exe +RTS -M1G -p -s -h -i0.1 -RTS sample.txt sample_out.txt
total time = 3.97 secs (3967 ticks # 1000 us, 1 processor)
total alloc = 2,321,595,564 bytes (excludes profiling overheads)
COST CENTRE MODULE %time %alloc
longestCommonSubstrB Main 43.3 33.1
longestCommonSubstrB.f Main 21.5 43.6
main.flattened Main 17.5 5.1
main Main 6.6 5.8
longestCommonSubstrB.g Main 5.0 5.8
readLexicon Main 2.5 2.8
transformOne Main 1.8 1.7
readLexicon.stripR Main 1.8 1.9
individual inherited
COST CENTRE MODULE no. entries %time %alloc %time %alloc
MAIN MAIN 45 0 0.1 0.0 100.0 100.0
main Main 91 0 6.6 5.8 99.9 100.0
main.flattened Main 93 1 17.5 5.1 89.1 89.4
transformOne Main 95 100000 1.8 1.7 71.6 84.3
longestCommonSubstrB Main 100 100000 43.3 33.1 69.8 82.5
longestCommonSubstrB.f Main 101 1400000 21.5 43.6 26.5 49.5
longestCommonSubstrB.g Main 104 4200000 5.0 5.8 5.0 5.8
readLexicon Main 92 1 2.5 2.8 4.2 4.8
readLexicon.stripR Main 98 0 1.8 1.9 1.8 1.9
CAF GHC.IO.Encoding.CodePage 80 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
CAF GHC.IO.Encoding 74 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
CAF GHC.IO.FD 70 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
CAF GHC.IO.Handle.FD 66 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
CAF System.Environment 65 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
CAF Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 54 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
CAF Main 52 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
transformOne Main 99 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
readLexicon Main 96 0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
readLexicon.stripR Main 97 1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
main Main 90 1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
UPDATE: The following program can be used to generate sample data. It expects one argument, the number of lines in the generated dataset. The generated data will be saved to the sample.txt file. When I generate 900k lines dataset with it (by running generateSample.exe 900000), the produced dataset makes the above program fail with heap overflow (the heap size was set to 1 GB). The resulting dataset is around 20 MB.
module Main where
import System.Environment (getArgs)
import Data.List (intercalate, permutations)
generate :: Int -> [(String,String,String)]
generate n = take n $ zip3 (f "banana") (f "ruanaba") (f "kikiriki")
where
f = cycle . permutations
main :: IO ()
main = do
(n:_) <- getArgs
let flattened = unlines . map f $ generate (read n :: Int)
writeFile "sample.txt" flattened
where
f (w1,w2,w3) = intercalate "\t" [w1, w2, w3]

Answer 1

It seems to me you've implemented a naive longest common substring, with terrible space complexity (at least O(n^2)). Strictness has nothing to do with it.
You'll want to implement a dynamic programming algo. You may find inspiration in the string-similarity package, or in the lcs function in the guts of the Diff package.