Re: GC (was: lists.texi)

[Miles Bader]

On 6/25/05, Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden> wrote:
> Well, obviously if you have very little resident memory and set
> gc-cons-threshold to a huge value, then conceivably your operating
> system could wind up spending most of its time swapping memory.  Then
> not only Emacs, but everything else as well, will become slow.  I do
> not know whether that is what Eli is referring too.  Certainly, if you
> have a reasonable amount of resident memory, increasing
> gc-cons-threshold to 4M should not create any such problems and it
> does speed up things.

It's certainly the case that most machines these days have vastly more
memory than even a few years ago.  For developers I think a practical
minimum is 512MB, for less demanding users, maybe 256MB (if you buy a
low-end budget computer, this is typically the amount of RAM it comes
with) -- but a 4MB gc threshold looks like nothing compared to either
one, and the current default (400KB) looks downright silly.

I also think OS memory management is much better these days, which
likewise suggests increasing the default limit.

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.