Constant garbage collection in 21.2.90.1 (pretest)

Constant garbage collection in 21.2.90.1 (pretest)

[Kevin A. Burton]

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For the record I think this happened in the pretest as well but I didn't
understand what was going on.

I was talking about my performance problems on #emacs and I was told to play
with GC settings.

Originally the symptoms were a Emacs session that would pause at random times
(often for 30-60 seconds) and then after 2-3 days of uptime would permanently
lock and fail to respond while taking 100% CPU.

Right off the bat I set:

(setq gc-cons-threshold (* 8192 8192))

Then my performance problems seems go go away only to resume after a few hours.

I then set:

(setq garbage-collection-messages t)

I noticed that I was getting a lot of GC messages after this.  Increasing the
gc-cons-threshold just seems to postpone the problem.

Could there be a memory leak somewhere?  What is the best way to debug this?  I
looked into the Emacs gc chapter but I didn't see anything that would help.

ug.

Kevin


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Re: Constant garbage collection in 21.2.90.1 (pretest)

[Richard Stallman]

    Could there be a memory leak somewhere?  What is the best way to debug this?  I
    looked into the Emacs gc chapter but I didn't see anything that would help.

I suspect there is a memory leak in Emacs, but I don't know anything
about the cause.  One possible cause is that some sort of history list
(or something like a history list which isn't officially called that)
is growing and we need to add code to truncate it occasionally.  There
could also be an ordinary memory leak involving non-GCable C data.

If you could narrow down which operations increase the size
inordinately, we might be able to find the problem.