Re: mem leak

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Miles Bader <miles.bader@necel.com> writes:

> Does anybody have advice for finding a memory leak in emacs?
>
> Recent builds seems to have some leak:  even with only a few small
> buffers open, Emacs rapidly consumes more and more memory (to the point
> where the system eventually becomes unusable).

garbage-collect is an interactive built-in function in `C source code'.
(garbage-collect)

Reclaim storage for Lisp objects no longer needed.
Garbage collection happens automatically if you cons more than
`gc-cons-threshold' bytes of Lisp data since previous garbage collection.
`garbage-collect' normally returns a list with info on amount of space in use:
 ((USED-CONSES . FREE-CONSES) (USED-SYMS . FREE-SYMS)
  (USED-MARKERS . FREE-MARKERS) USED-STRING-CHARS USED-VECTOR-SLOTS
  (USED-FLOATS . FREE-FLOATS) (USED-INTERVALS . FREE-INTERVALS)
  (USED-STRINGS . FREE-STRINGS))
However, if there was overflow in pure space, `garbage-collect'
returns nil, because real GC can't be done.

[back]

This might help tracking down what kind of memory is consumed, and
whether it is Lisp-visible.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum