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Add deduplication table for `IfaceType`

Hannes Siebenhandl requested to merge wip/fendor/ifacetype-deduplication into master

Add deduplication table for IfaceType

The type IfaceType is a highly redundant, tree-like data structure. While benchmarking, we realised that the high redundancy of IfaceType causes high memory consumption in GHCi sessions. We fix this by adding a deduplication table to the serialisation of ModIface, similar to how we deduplicate Names and FastStrings. When reading the interface file back, the table allows us to automatically share identical values of IfaceType.

The type IfaceType is a highly redundant, tree-like data structure. While benchmarking, we realised that the high redundancy of IfaceType causes high memory consumption in GHCi sessions when byte code is embedded into the .hi file via -fwrite-if-simplified-core or -fbyte-code-and-object-code. Loading such .hi files from disk introduces many duplicates of memory expensive values in IfaceType, such as IfaceTyCon, IfaceTyConApp, IA_Arg and many more.

We improve the memory behaviour of GHCi by adding an additional deduplication table for IfaceType to the serialisation of ModIface, similar to how we deduplicate Names and FastStrings. When reading the interface file back, the table allows us to automatically share identical values of IfaceType.

To provide some numbers, we evaluated this patch on the agda code base. We loaded the full library from the .hi files, which contained the embedded core expressions (-fwrite-if-simplified-core).

Before this patch:

  • Load time: 11.7 s, 2.5 GB maximum residency.

After this patch:

  • Load time: 7.3 s, 1.7 GB maximum residency.

This deduplication has the beneficial side effect to additionally reduce the size of the on-disk interface files tremendously.

For example, on agda, we reduce the size of .hi files (with -fwrite-if-simplified-core):

  • Before: 101 MB on disk
  • Now: 24 MB on disk

This has even a beneficial side effect on the cabal store. We reduce the size of the store on disk:

  • Before: 341 MB on disk
  • Now: 310 MB on disk

Note, none of the dependencies have been compiled with -fwrite-if-simplified-core, but IfaceType occurs in multiple locations in a ModIface.

We also add IfaceType deduplication table to .hie serialisation and refactor .hie file serialisation to use the same infrastrucutre as putWithTables.

Add run-time configurability of .hi file compression

Introduce the flag -fwrite-if-compression=<n> which allows to configure the compression level of writing .hi files.

The motivation is that some deduplication operations are too expensive for the average use case. Hence, we introduce multiple compression levels that have a minimal impact on performance, but still reduce the memory residency and .hi file size on disk considerably.

We introduce three compression levels:

  • 1: Normal mode. This is the least amount of compression. It deduplicates only Name and FastStrings, and is naturally the fastest compression mode.
  • 2: Safe mode. It has a noticeable impact on .hi file size and is marginally slower than Normal mode. In general, it should be safe to always use Safe mode.
  • 3: Full deduplication mode. Deduplicate as much as we can, resulting in minimal .hi files, but at the cost of additional compilation time.

Reading .hi files doesn't need to know the initial compression level, and can always deserialise a ModIface. This allows users to experiment with different compression levels for packages, without recompilation of dependencies.

Note, the deduplication also has an additional side effect of reduced memory consumption to implicit sharing of deduplicated elements. See #24540 for example where that matters.

Add Eq and Ord instance to IfaceType

We add an Ord instance so that we can store IfaceType in a Data.Map container. This is required to deduplicate IfaceType while writing .hi files to disk. Deduplication has many beneficial consequences of both file size and memory usage, as the deduplication enables implicit sharing of values. See issue #24540 for more motivation.

The Ord instance would be unnecessary if we used a TrieMap instead of Data.Map for the deduplication process. While in theory this is Clearly the better option, experiments on the agda code base showed that a TrieMap implementation has worse run-time performance characteristics.

To the change itself, we mostly derive Eq and Ord. This requires us to change occurrences of FastString with LexicalFastString, since FastString has no Ord instance. We change the definition of IfLclName to a newtype of LexicalFastString, to make such changes in the future easier.

Bump haddock submodule for IfLclName newtype changes.

This PR is currently stacked on top of !12346 (closed) as it requires its refactorings.

  • Adds regression test cases for interface file sizes

Closes #24540

Edited by Hannes Siebenhandl

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