Re: How to debug memory leaks

[edgar]

From:   Stefan Monnier
> > So maybe that memory effects, whatever they are, leaking, plumbing,
> > I do not observe it now, but who knows...
>
> Call it "excessive memory use".  That term even has the advantage of
> including a notion of personal judgment (in the term "excessive") which
> indeed reflects the fact that maybe this is not the result of a bug, 
> but
> you still find it excessive (and other people may disagree without
>                                  making your judgment wrong since it's 
> just an opinion).

The risk of leaving an unfruitful discussion is to let others think that 
a point has been made which could possibly influence or confuse 
outsiders and have unexpected adverse consequenes.

May be "management" is a better term, but obviously Stefan has a 
different idea of "leak" (I guess as related to memory injection--I 
don't know, and would not like to add yet another level of needless 
argument). I did write

    I think that it is leaking memory

which implies that I did not know if that was certain. I apologise for 
any misconstrued conclusions from my statement

    It seems that font leaking is a common issue as well

I meant that, in general terms, /font leaking has been found by other 
users to happen as well/. If by the end of:

    find(ing) and correct(ing) the memory leak, or point me in the right 
direction

it would have been found that there was no such leak, the conclusion 
would have been something like: oh, this was not a leak. However, we 
cannot really conclude this, because the debugging process never 
happened. Whether it was a leak or not is completely uncertain; I just 
replaced the pieces which I thought that were using memory excessively.

The point which is meant is that a process running in Emacs was probably 
using memory, did not liberate that memory after it finished, and used 
more memory the next time it was used, all of which consumed a lot of 
RAM and swap memory until the computer froze.

Can we leave it at that? It would have been nice to learn how to debug 
this, but we all have higher priorities, I think.

Again, thank you very much. I really enjoy my Emacs, and I owe it to you 
people :D .