Haskell: performance of IORefs

Question

I have been trying to encode an algorithm in Haskell that requires using lots of mutable references, but it is (perhaps not surprisingly) very slow in comparison to purely lazy code. Consider a very simple example:

module Main where

import Data.IORef
import Control.Monad
import Control.Monad.Identity

list :: [Int]
list = [1..10^6]

main1 = mapM newIORef list >>= mapM readIORef >>= print
main2 = print $ map runIdentity $ map Identity list

Running GHC 7.8.2 on my machine, main1 takes 1.2s and uses 290MB of memory, while main2 takes only 0.4s and uses a mere 1MB. Is there any trick to prevent this growth, especially in space? I often need IORefs for non-primitive types unlike Int, and assumed that an IORef would use an additional pointer much like a regular thunk, but my intuition seems to be wrong.

I have already tried a specialized list type with an unpacked IORef, but with no significant difference.

Answer 1

The problem is your use of mapM, which always performs poorly on large lists both in time and space. The correct solution is to fuse away the intermediate lists by using mapM_ and (>=>):

import Data.IORef
import Control.Monad

list :: [Int]
list = [1..10^6]

main = mapM_ (newIORef >=> readIORef >=> print) list

This runs in constant space and gives excellent performance, running in 0.4 seconds on my machine.

Edit: In answer to your question, you can also do this with pipes to avoid having to manually fuse the loop:

import Data.IORef
import Pipes
import qualified Pipes.Prelude as Pipes

list :: [Int]
list = [1..10^6]

main = runEffect $
    each list >-> Pipes.mapM newIORef >-> Pipes.mapM readIORef >-> Pipes.print

This runs in constant space in about 0.7 seconds on my machine.

Answer 2

This is very likely not about IORef, but about strictness. Actions in the IO monad are serial -- all previous actions must complete before the next one can be started. So

mapM newIORef list

generates a million IORefs before anything is read.

However,

map runIdentity . map Identity
= map (runIdentity . Identity)
= map id

which streams very nicely, so we print one element of the list, then generate the next one, etc.

If you want a fairer comparison, use a strict map:

map' :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map' f [] = []
map' f (x:xs) = (f x:) $! map' f xs