I vaguely recall reading in https://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Concurrent-Programming-Haske... that there was research done into this in ghc but it wasn’t possible to generalize the behavior so that there weren’t situations which were very bad. I’ll look for it soon, see if I can find it

For more practical examples like this, I highly recommend the Haskell Data Analysis Cookbook [1].

After learning the basics of Haskell, having a book chock full of practical examples of things like handling CVS files, JSON, trees, graphs, machine learning, and Haskell's outstanding support for parallel computation--is a really helpful resource. The code is extremely well written; clear, concise, and readable. The author has also put the source code on GitHub for each chapter. [2]

Afterwards, to take your skills to the next level, check out Simon Marlow's Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell [3]. Simon now works at Facebook, where they're using Haskell in production [4] [5].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Haskell-Analysis-Cookbook-Nishant-Shuk...

[2] https://github.com/BinRoot/Haskell-Data-Analysis-Cookbook

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Concurrent-Programming-Haskel...

[4] https://code.facebook.com/posts/302060973291128/open-sourcin...

[5] http://community.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/haxl-icfp14.pd...