Dissecting Transactional Executions in Haskell

In this paper, we present a Haskell Transactional Memory benchmark in order to provide a comprehensive application suite for the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM) researchers. We develop a framework to profile the execution of the benchmark applications and to collect detailed runtime data on their transactional behavior. Using a composite of the collected raw data, we propose new transactional performance metrics. We analyze key statistics relative to critical regions, transactional log-keeping and overall transactional overhead and accordingly draw conclusions on the results of our extensive analysis of the set of applications. The results advance our comprehension on different characteristics of applications under the transactional management of the pure functional programming language, Haskell.