Re: How to debug elisp memory leak

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> You mentioned a fix in the works for this problem, what is the status
> of this? My emacs is from /usr/ports as of june 1. 2004, and the
> FreeBSD is 4.8-RELEASE.

The fix for that problem is installed in the Emacs-CVS trunk (and will thus
be in the next major Emacs release).

Of course, along with the memory-usage.el, it's always worthwhile to check
the size(s) of the process as reported by `ps' (i.e. things like VM and RSS).

7MB of gaps for 10MB of memory is clearly not an efficient use of memory
(and IIRC the Emacs-CVS code should perform better in this respect as well),
but 10MB should not be a cause for a "lisp pointer size" warning (which
should be closer to the 100MB order of magnitude on your Emacs).  So maybe
it's got to do with FreeBSD's memory layout which interacts badly with
Emacs's, or it can be that the extra memory used is not found by
memory-usage.el (which is why the `ps' stats are important).


        Stefan