How long does it take to create 1 million threads in Haskell?

concurrency, green-threads, haskell, multithreading

Solution

from here.

import Control.Concurrent
import Control.Monad

n = 100000

main = do
    left  <- newEmptyMVar
    right <- foldM make left [0..n-1]
    putMVar right 0    -- bang!
    x <- takeMVar left -- wait for completion
    print x
 where
    make l n = do
       r <- newEmptyMVar
       forkIO (thread n l r)
       return r

thread :: Int -> MVar Int -> MVar Int -> IO ()
thread _ l r = do
   v <- takeMVar r
   putMVar l $! v+1

on my not quite 2.5gh laptop this takes less than a second.

set n to 1000000 and it becomes hard to write the rest of this post because the OS is paging like crazy. definitely using more than a gig of ram (didn't let it finish). If you have enough RAM it would definitely work in the appropriate 10x the time of the 100000 version.

Problem

What I understand, Haskell have green threads. But how light weight are they. Is it possible to create 1 million threads? Or How long would it take for 100 000 threads?

Original source