Re: Tooltips GC overhead

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

> The absolute value for `x-show-tip' is surely wrong.  `x-show-tip'
> is responsible for 90% (or maybe 89%) of the allocations.

A potential source of such errors is that we count the moment when
"malloc" is called, and this can be misleading: you could do a thousand
"cons" calls in x-show-tip, all satisfied from the list of free
cons-cells, and then a single "cons" call elsewhere which finds the free
list to be empty and hence does a "malloc" which will re-fill the free
list with another thousand cons cells.

Often/usually, this should be "random" and hence irrelevant
statistically (as long as we have enough samples), but there might well
be cases where the allocation patterns end up always shifting the
blame elsewhere.


        Stefan