Re: Memory usage report

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Well, Lars basically said the same, but neither of you explain _why_
>> would something like that be useful.  Do tell, please.
>
> If you see that you've got 13GBs worth of cons cells, you might wonder
> what variable that's holding on to them.  The list of "largest
> variables", with `some-stupid-mode-I'd-forgotten-about-cache' on top
> will give you a hint.

Eli's question boils down to: can you point to a concrete case where
this would have been useful?

I have done such digging once or twice when the Lisp heap was taking
more space than I expected, but it's quite rare IME (and apparently in
Eli's as well).

So, while it might be nice to add it to `memory-usage` it's unlikely to
help in the more common cases of excessive memory use where the memory
is eaten up by objects allocated in the C part of the heap.


        Stefan