stack --profile shouldn't force --ghc-options='-auto-all'

[robsmith11]

I want to use only manual cost centers when profiling, but it appears that stack is forcing --ghc-options='-auto-all' whenever profiling is enabled. Even if I pass --ghc-options='-fno-prof-auto', the auto cost center are still used.

[robsmith11]

Do you know of any easy workaround? I'm trying to profile my application, but the auto cost centers in vector break the critical fusion optimization making profiling unusable.

[mgsloan]

Not exactly an "easy" workaround, but one temporary option might be to compile stack with the -auto-all stuff removed.

I'm surprised that --ghc-options='-fno-prof-auto' doesn't do the trick. Perhaps we will need to provide a --profile-no-auto flag?

[duog]

I'm running into this now. The issue seems to be that stack passes -auto-all and -auto-cafs AFTER manually specified ghc-options, so I'm unable to override it with -fno-prof-auto etc.

[tirumaraiselvan]

Hi, any plans to work further on this issue?

[tuomohopia]

I'm guessing this isn't seeing any progress anymore.

Did anyone come up with any working workaround? Would hate to have to move to cabal just because of this.

[DouglasRaillard]

Hi, +1 on the issue, passing --ghc-options=-fno-prof-auto does not seem to do the trick, making the actual information I'm looking for lost in the noise (and quite likely completely transformed, the runtime jumps from 6 seconds to ~45s when enabling profiling).
For some reason, it even seems to profile >>= from attoparsec Zepto type, even though it's marked as inline.

EDIT: for future reference, the solution from this article seems to work:
https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-01-30-haskell-profiling/
Use this in stack.yaml:

apply-ghc-options: everything
rebuild-ghc-options: true

And then rebuild with appropriate profiling options. This will rebuild all dependencies and apply the options you chose.