Debugging advice

[Adam Taylor]

My environment is (maybe unfortunately) Cygwin64 under Windows, of course.

Occasionally while working emacs stops responding to me and I watch it's
memory consumption rise from 407MB to 1533MB along with a ramp in CPU usage.

I want to find out what it is doing and can not find any information on how
to monitor background activity in Emacs.

Another clue is it doesn't seem to happen if Emacs is just quiescent: Just
up on the screen but I'm not actively using it. When using the editor, the
problem occurs on a relatively frequent beat rate - once every few minutes.
It takes out Emacs for about 20 seconds or so.

I've turned off anything on a time (like desktop-save-mode).

I'd love to figure out what Emacs runs off and does

Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Adam