Re: (heap 1024 82721 1933216)

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 05:51:26 -0800
>> From: Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>
>> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> On 01/18/2014 05:50 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> >> Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 05:39:30 -0800
>> >> From: Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>
>> >>
>> >> On Emacs trunk, I recently got into a situation where Emacs had a vsize
>> >> of over 6GB. After killing all buffers, garbage-collect reported (heap
>> >> 1024 82721 1933216) as the most interesting part of its on its return
>> >> value. dlmalloc's free memory retention seems a bit severe here. Are we
>> >> just badly fragmenting the heap?
>> >
>> > Buffers are not allocated off the heap, as you well know.
>> 
>> No, but their buffer locals might be.
>
> I find it hard to believe that buffer locals could devour gigabytes of
> memory, no matter what fragmentation did we cause.

If one packs a history of buffer contents in strings in a buffer-local
history variable...  Recent discussions made obvious that this kind of
thing does not appear outlandish to Emacs programmers, so it is to be
expected that stuff like that is already in the wild.

-- 
David Kastrup