Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Session statistics is much harder to gather.
>> It is more realistic to ask people about benchmarking their init.el if
>> we want to be serious about bumping gc-cons-threshold.
>
> We should ask them to report statistics after running a session for
> enough time.  What exactly qualifies as "enough time" depends on the
> usage patterns: there are people, like me, who run a single session
> for weeks on end, and there are others who start a new session every
> day or even more frequently.  What is interesting is the statistics
> near the end of the session.
>
> Statistics from loading init.el is much less interesting, mainly
> because reducing GC impact during such short intervals is easy and
> well-understood.  We could collect such statistics as well, but it is
> not the main goal from where I stand.

I think we can ask interested users to install a package like
https://git.sr.ht/~yantar92/emacs-gc-stats/tree/main/item/emacs-gc-stats.el

Then, they can share the results after running Emacs with the package
for some time.

See the attached statistics data example.

WDYT?

>> That's why I am seeing reducing the frequency of GCs as more important
>> than trying to reduce GC time, which cannot be even halved easily.
>
> A single very long GC will be annoying even if it happens rarely.  So
> I don't agree the frequency of GCs is so much more important than the
> time it takes to perform a GC.

I do not really mean that it is not important.
But there is little Emacs can do about the memory consumption. It
mainly depends on the third-party packages being used.

In contrast, GC frequency is something that can be tweaked easily on
Emacs side by altering GC thresholds.

>> >> - memory-limit 6,518,516, stable
>> >
>> > ??? That's 6 GiB.  Didn't you say your memory footprint stabilizes at
>> > 1 GiB?
>> 
>> memory-limit is a natively compiled function defined in subr.el.
>
> If the Emacs memory usage in system monitor is 1.7 Gib, how come
> memory-limit says it's 6.5 GiB?

6.5Gib is virtual memory. 1.7Gib is actually used memory - the value
people usually mean when considering memory footprint.