Memory Usage On Emacs 24 Lucid Linux:

["T.V. Raman" <tv.raman.tv@gmail.com>]

Stefan,

You were spot on --- I had HISTSIZE  set to infinity.

This is a setting I have had for the last 6+ years at work, I'll
append the shell configuration bits I was using to essentially
have an infinitely long history. It worked correctly until about
May 2011, which is when Emacs 24 built from git/bzr started
displaying the memory leak behavior we have been discussing.

I've removed these from my shell environemnt, and emacs 24 is
running happily with my full emacs environment loaded.

Below, I'll append the shell setup that caused the problem --
suspect just taking out histsize would have fixed it, but I'm
showing the set up here because I believe it would be valuable
for emacs folks who understand the bash interaction to come up
with a simpler, cleaner way of doing this.


export command_oriented_history=1
export history_control ignoredups
shopt -s histappend
export HISTSIZE=999999999
homeraman
home/raman
export TVR_SHELL_LOG=/home/raman/.jotlog/shell.log




On 3/13/12, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> After running emacs -q -- and then M-x shell, I see all of the
>> memory on the machine getting shewed up -- at least as reported
>> by free.
>
> Aha!
>
>> Shell: emacs -q M-x shell M-x memory-usage
>
>> Garbage collection stats:
>> ((54977 . 10205) (15045 . 0) (90 . 121) 417724 1000327014 (67 . 191)
>> (117 . 161) (25648 . 1043))
>
>>  =>	879632+163280 bytes in cons cells
>> 	722160+0 bytes in symbols
>> 	3600+4840 bytes in markers
>> 	1072+3056 bytes in floats
>> 	6552+9016 bytes in intervals
>> 	820736+33376 bytes in string headers
>> 	417724 bytes of string chars
>> 	417724 bytes of vector slots
>
>> Total bytes in lisp objects: 1003392058 (live 1003178490, dead 213568)
>
> OK, that's very helpful, it narrows it down a good deal.
> Now, all we have to figure out is how on earth does "M-x shell" create
> so many (or such large) vectors!
> Could it be you have $HISTSIZE set to a really large number?
>
>
>         Stefan
>