It isn't enough to compile your program for profiling with -prof!
When you run your profiled program, you must tell the runtime system (RTS) what you want to profile (e.g., time and/or space), and how you wish the collected data to be reported. You also may wish to set the sampling interval used in time profiling.
Executive summary: ./a.out +RTS -pT produces a time profile in a.out.prof; ./a.out +RTS -hC produces space-profiling info which can be mangled by hp2ps and viewed with ghostview (or equivalent).
Profiling runtime flags are passed to your program between the usual +RTS and -RTS options.
The -p option produces a standard time profile report. It is written into the file <program>.prof.
The -P option produces a more detailed report containing the actual time and allocation data as well. (Not used much.)
The -px option generates profiling information in the XML format understood by our new profiling tool, see Section 5.3.
Set the profiling (sampling) interval to <secs> seconds (the default is 1 second). Fractions are allowed: for example -i0.2 will get 5 samples per second. This only affects heap profiling; time profiles are always sampled on a 1/50 second frequency.
Produce a detailed heap profile of the heap occupied by live closures. The profile is written to the file <program>.hp from which a PostScript graph can be produced using hp2ps (see Section 5.6).
The heap space profile may be broken down by different criteria:
cost centre which produced the closure (the default).
cost centre module which produced the closure.
closure description—a string describing the closure.
closure type—a string describing the closure's type.
It's often useful to select just some subset of the heap when profiling. To do this, the following filters are available. You may use multiple filters, in which case a closure has to satisfy all filters to appear in the final profile. Filtering criterion are independent of what it is you ask to see. So, for example, you can specify a profile by closure description (-hD) but ask to filter closures by producer module (-hm{...}).
Available filters are:
Restrict to one of the specified cost centers. Since GHC deals in cost center stacks, the specified cost centers pertain to the top stack element. For example, -hc{Wurble,Burble} selects all cost center stacks whose top element is Wurble or Burble.
Restrict to closures produced by functions in one of the specified modules.
Restrict to closures whose description-string is one of the specified descriptions. Description strings are pretty arcane. An easy way to find plausible strings to specify is to first do a -hD profile and then inspect the description-strings which appear in the resulting profile.
Restrict to closures having one of the specified types.
The -hx option generates heap profiling information in the XML format understood by our new profiling tool (NOTE: heap profiling with the new tool is not yet working! Use hp2ps-style heap profiling for the time being).