Matthew Pickering authored 4 years ago and Marge Bot committed 4 years ago

Related to #19381 #19359 #14702

After a spike in memory usage we have been conservative about returning
allocated blocks to the OS in case we are still allocating a lot and would
end up just reallocating them. The result of this was that up to 4 * live_bytes
of blocks would be retained once they were allocated even if memory usage ended up
a lot lower.

For a heap of size ~1.5G, this would result in OS memory reporting 6G which is
both misleading and worrying for users.
In long-lived server applications this results in consistent high memory
usage when the live data size is much more reasonable (for example ghcide)

Therefore we have a new (2021) strategy which starts by retaining up to 4 * live_bytes
of blocks before gradually returning uneeded memory back to the OS on subsequent
major GCs which are NOT caused by a heap overflow.

Each major GC which is NOT caused by heap overflow increases the consec_idle_gcs
counter and the amount of memory which is retained is inversely proportional to this number.
By default the excess memory retained is
 oldGenFactor (controlled by -F) / 2 ^ (consec_idle_gcs * returnDecayFactor)

On a major GC caused by a heap overflow, the `consec_idle_gcs` variable is reset to 0
(as we could continue to allocate more, so retaining all the memory might make sense).

Therefore setting bigger values for `-Fd` makes the rate at which memory is returned slower.
Smaller values make it get returned faster. Setting `-Fd0` disables the
memory return completely, which is the behaviour of older GHC versions.

The default is `-Fd4` which results in the following scaling:

> mapM print [(x, 1/ (2**(x / 4))) | x <- [1 :: Double ..20]]
(1.0,0.8408964152537146)
(2.0,0.7071067811865475)
(3.0,0.5946035575013605)
(4.0,0.5)
(5.0,0.4204482076268573)
(6.0,0.35355339059327373)
(7.0,0.29730177875068026)
(8.0,0.25)
(9.0,0.21022410381342865)
(10.0,0.17677669529663687)
(11.0,0.14865088937534013)
(12.0,0.125)
(13.0,0.10511205190671433)
(14.0,8.838834764831843e-2)
(15.0,7.432544468767006e-2)
(16.0,6.25e-2)
(17.0,5.255602595335716e-2)
(18.0,4.4194173824159216e-2)
(19.0,3.716272234383503e-2)
(20.0,3.125e-2)

So after 13 consecutive GCs only 0.1 of the maximum memory used will be retained.

Further to this decay factor, the amount of memory we attempt to retain is
also influenced by the GC strategy for the oldest generation. If we are using
a copying strategy then we will need at least 2 * live_bytes for copying to take
place, so we always keep that much. If using compacting or nonmoving then we need a lower number,
so we just retain at least `1.2 * live_bytes` for some protection.

In future we might want to make this behaviour more aggressive, some
relevant literature is

> Ulan Degenbaev, Jochen Eisinger, Manfred Ernst, Ross McIlroy, and Hannes Payer. 2016. Idle time garbage collection scheduling. SIGPLAN Not. 51, 6 (June 2016), 570–583. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2980983.2908106

which describes the "memory reducer" in the V8 javascript engine which
on an idle collection immediately returns as much memory as possible.