Ben Gamari authored May 30, 2018 and Ben Gamari committed May 30, 2018

When we allocate the heap on POSIX platforms we generally just ask for a
1TB chunk of address space and call it a day. However, if the user has
set a ulimit then this request will fail. In this case we would
previously try successively smaller allocation requests, reducing the
request size by a factor of two each time.

However, this means that GHC will significantly allocate a significantly
smaller heap than the available physical memory size in some
circumstances.  Imagine, for instance, a machine with 512 GB of physical
memory but a ulimit of 511 GB: we would be limited to a 256 GB heap.

We now use a less aggressive back-off policy, reducing by one-eighth the
last allocation size each try.

Thanks to luispedro for the suggested approach.

Test Plan: Validate

Reviewers: simonmar, erikd

Subscribers: rwbarton, thomie

GHC Trac Issues: #14492

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D4215