ForeignPtr touched in FFI wrapper is never discarded
If a ForeignPtr
is touched in an FFI wrapper (foreign import ccall "wrapper"
), it appears to never be discarded. For example, the program below demonstrates a space leak due to multiple mallocForeignPtrBytes
results hanging around forever.
import Control.Concurrent (threadDelay)
import Foreign.ForeignPtr
import Foreign.Marshal.Utils (fillBytes)
import Foreign.Ptr (FunPtr)
foreign import ccall "wrapper" wrap :: IO () -> IO (FunPtr (IO ()))
main :: IO ()
main = flip mapM_ [0..50] $ \_ -> do
let len = 30 * 2^20
fp <- mallocForeignPtrBytes len
withForeignPtr fp $ \p -> fillBytes p 0 len
_ <- wrap $ touchForeignPtr fp
threadDelay 100000
Each of the 50 iterations allocates 30 megabytes of memory via mallocForeignPtrBytes
. None of those allocations is ever freed, resulting in around 1.5 gigabytes of memory use by the time the program terminates.
(Neither fillBytes
nor threadDelay
are required to reproduce the issue: they are there to respectively touch the memory so that it's fully allocated by the OS and to slow the program down so that one can view the memory usage gradually increasing e.g. with top
.)
Example run, with almost 1.6 gigabytes of memory usage reported by GNU time (the "maxresident" bit):
$ ghc --make asdf.hs
[1 of 1] Compiling Main ( asdf.hs, asdf.o )
Linking asdf ...
$ /usr/bin/time ./asdf
0.12user 0.54system 0:05.77elapsed 11%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1587300maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+138078minor)pagefaults 0swaps
People bitten by this can probably work around it without too much trouble by either:
- Simply avoiding the trigger, i.e.
touchForeignPtr
in a wrapper. In my case, that amounts to changing some functions to takePtr a
instead ofForeignPtr a
and moving somewithForeignPtr
calls around, possibly adding manualtouchForeignPtr
calls somewhere. - Switching to manual memory management with functions like
mallocBytes
andfree
.
But the issue seems rather nasty regardless. (At least it took me a while to pin down.) Hopefully it can be fixed without too much trouble.
Trac metadata
Trac field | Value |
---|---|
Version | 7.10.1 |
Type | Bug |
TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
Priority | normal |
Resolution | Unresolved |
Component | Compiler |
Test case | |
Differential revisions | |
BlockedBy | |
Related | |
Blocking | |
CC | |
Operating system | |
Architecture |