Re: Does Emacs return memory to the system on Mac OS X or *BSD?

[George Plymale II <georgie@southernohio.net>]

> IOW, you sometimes see Emacs use an amount of memory you think is too
> large, but you have no idea whatsoever why that might be the case

Actually, I have monitored which packages, functions, etc. cause Emacs
memory usage to spike up and I've monitored how much of that memory is
marked as "dead" via the memory-usage package on ELPA. So I do have an
idea about why I think some memory seems just a little too large and
which things could be causing that.

> (IIUC you don't even know if it's really too large or if it causes a
> problem)

There's rarely ever a problem. It's not "really too large." My only
point here was to satisfy my own curiosity about whether or not Emacs
gives memory back as Eli originally suggested is possible. It doesn't
hurt to have one process use less memory on my system. But I'm not
trying to complain about said memory usage (which you seem to think that
I'm doing). I was just trying to satisfy a little point of curiosity as
Eli suggested could be done here. Don't read too much into my comment:
"although I've not seen Emacs exceed 300 MB, which isn't too bad", as I
was merely pointing out that I, too, have not had serious memory
problems with Emacs, just a curiosity about the situation.

> There can be *many* different reasons, beside the fact that some freed
> memory is not returned to the OS. 

Ok, I appreciate that there are different reasons as to why memory usage
goes up aside from just not giving stuff back to the OS. I was only
wondering if it is possible on the aforementioned systems, to perhaps
somewhat mitigate the issue if I ever did have a problem.

> More to the point, whether the memory is returned to the OS or not is
> usually the least concern on a laptop or desktop machine.

Ok, I respect that opinion. As previously said, I understand that such a
thing is often not an important factor in real situations. I was just
wondering if it happens or can happen on my platforms.