Re: NS port: How to debug excessive garbage collection?

[Keith David Bershatsky <esq@lawlist.com>]

Thank you, Alex, for the advice regarding testing for garbage collection issues on the other two platforms (i.e., X11 and w32), and also regarding make certain edits/improvements to the existing code of multiple fake cursors.  I will work on these in the next day or so.

Using an unsophisticated method of commenting out various modifications that I have made over the past few years, I am working towards coming up with a minimal (or at least significantly reduced) working example to demonstrate the issue that I am observing.  I will need another 1 to 2 hours with a cup of coffee after a good night sleep ....

At this point, I am about 98 percent certain that the main issue traces to the function mc_helper and the cache for fake cursors that have already been laid.  In a nutshell, Emacs gets bogged down by a list of 100 elements of sub-lists -- and this is true even when the sub-list is reduced to just one element (instead of fourteen); e.g.,:

  '((make_fixnum (1))(make_fixnum (2))(make_fixnum (3)) ... (make_fixnum (99))

Eliminating other calls to the creation of floats appears to help reduce the overhead a little, but the main problem occurs with the master cache created by mc_helper.

I'll continue chiseling away tomorrow ...

Keith