Re: how do you track down emacs memory leaks?

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

"Ami Fischman" <ami@fischman.org> writes:

>> Does this problem only show up when you use gnus?
>
> Yes.
>
>> Could you try keeping
>> another Emacs session around for other non-gnus usage, and see if it
>> leaks memory?
>
> I have and it doesn't.  At least not nearly at the rate that the
> gnus-using session does.
>
> I updated my version of gnus from ngnus-0.10 to CVS head yesterday and
> the leak seems to have slowed down significantly - only about 8MB
> overnight.  So I suspect some trigger has been coincidentally
> suppressed, but it seems that no elisp code should be able to cause
> emacs to grow in memory usage disproportional to the numbers reported
> by memory-usage, so there is still probably a lurking leak in emacs.
>
> Do you have any tools/techniques you use to track down C-level leaks?

I'm afraid not.  Maybe someone else on this list can suggest something.

One possibility is to try and write a simple test case that demonstrates
the leak.  For instance, a short Elisp program that keeps creating and
killing network processes.  If such a program causes memory to increase,
that would demonstrate that the memory leak is occurring in the Emacs
network process code.