Re: Emacs bzr memory footprint

[Sven Joachim]

On 2011-10-22 09:34 +0200, Carsten Mattner wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Stefan Monnier
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > This creates two-level fragmentation: the whole heap is fragmented as seen
>> > by malloc(), and allocated space is fragmented too, as seen by Emacs. Since
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>> > solid workload will consume 100M of the heap, the most of this 90M will be 
>> > re-used -
>>
>> Exactly: so this fragmentation is not a serious problem in the sense
>> that this free memory can be (re)used by Emacs.
>>
>> > but it will never freed.
>>
>> Right, so it's a problem in the sense that this memory will not be
>> available to other processes.
>>
>> While this is not perfect, I don't consider it to be a serious problem.
>> E.g. when people complain about Emacs using a lot of memory it's always
>> (until now and I think in Nix's case as well) a case of too much memory
>> being used because of something like a leak, and not just "Emacs doesn't
>> return its free memory to the OS".
>
> It is a problem for everybody like me who doesn't have
> gigs of free RAM. Sorry.
>
> I'll remember to --disable-gnutls and not use Gnus for my
> own safety, for the moment. That's a good catch and seems
> to help.

Actually, Gnus is not a memory hog as long as you build Emacs
"--without-gnutls".  But with gnutls support, it's clearly leaking
memory.

Cheers,
       Sven