Re: (heap 1024 82721 1933216)

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

>> Could be.  For an Emacs that grew to 6GB, I don't find it worrisome
>> if it doesn't shrink back below 2GB.
[...]
> Longer-term, it would be nice to be able to compact objects. We could move
> objects during the unmark phase of GC by looking for forwarding pointers to
> new object locations. (Of course, objects found through conservative
> scanning would have to be considered pinned.)

Lots of work for *very* little benefit.  I've pretty much never seen
a case where a user is really annoyed just by Emacs's size "after
freeing everything".  In pretty much all cases, the user was already
annoyed at Emacs's size *before* freeing everything, so that's the
problem to solve.  Once this problem is solved, the fact that the memory
is not very much returned to the OS is usually not a problem any more.

>> I'm much more worried about: how on earth did it grow to 6GB?
> I have no idea --- I was just doing normal editing over a few dozen files.

Yet, *that* is the problem.  The fact that freeing everything didn't let
you work around this problem is of very little concern.

So if you ever bump into such a situation, don't bother trying to free
stuff, and instead try and figure out what is eating all that memory.


        Stefan