Re: Random "Regular expression too big"

[Donovan Kolbly <dkolbly@gmail.com>]

On Aug 19, 9:44 pm, Joseph Shraibman <j...@iname.com> wrote:
> In the last couple of days this starting being a problem for me, I don't
> know why.  I'm getting it most of the time.  Sometimes I can't even exit
> emacs because the quit command fails with "Regular expression too big"

I've been seeing this intermittently for a while, also, and it seems
to come in bursts.  Trying the --debug-init thing, I briefly saw
something in the *Message*s that made me think it had to do with the
operation of painting the screen.  And sometimes when it happens at
startup, the screen is not fully painted and fonts are messed up (lots
of boxes instead of glyphs).  Now I can't repro that one, though.

It seems to have nothing to do with regular expressions or init files,
except
maybe some timing characteristics, because it's completely non-
deterministic.

I managed to capture an strace -ttt output of an emacs startup that
did produce
the error and one that did not, but the asynchronous nature of emacs'
event loop
did not lend itself to analysis at that level.