bug#20220: severe memory leak on emacs 24.4.1

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2015 20:07:29 -0600
> From: Mario Valencia <mariovalspi@gmail.com>
> Cc: 20220@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> Then the shell execute function is worthless. I had used it for opening the
> browser and also for opening files with an external program, or to open them in
> the explorer, i guess i will have to remove all use of that function from my
> scripts.

Well, it's your decision, of course.  However, I think that
"worthless" is too extreme, and not using it at all is too radical,
even if you can do nothing in terms of your system configuration to
bring down the amount of resources consumed by each invocation.  One
thread and 8 MB of memory is not that large, unless you really invoke
that command tens or times in a row.

Moreover, after reproducing your recipe on several machine, I
concluded that the actual consumption of resources does somehow depend
on system configuration.  Out of 4 systems I tried that on, only 1
showed a 8MB increase in the memory footprint and an additional thread
per invocation of w32-shell-execute; all the other systems didn't
start any additional threads and their memory footprint growth was
much smaller.  On Windows 8.1, I actually saw no memory growth at all.

So perhaps reviewing your shell extensions, like Daniel suggested, and
removing those you don't need, will fix this.

It is also possible that if you leave Emacs running for a long enough
time after closing the URL, the thread and its memory will be
released; I didn't try to investigate that.