bug#16039: repeated emacs crashes (in GC?)

Dear Emacs masters,

I have been experiencing repeated crashes on Emacs, and am wondering if the following reports could lead someone to figure out what the problem might be. These crashes occur after a few hours of normal use, almost always during reading mail with vm. I am attaching an abbreviated backtrace when running emacs under a debugger, and and the full one (8Mb) is available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/3hg8v9ct2omc8x9/emacs-bt.txt. I am happy to try helping with the debugging given specific instructions on commands to give lldb.

I see this crash on both

GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin, NS apple-appkit-1038.36)

of 2013-03-13 on bob.porkrind.org

Windowing system distributor `Apple', version 10.3.1265

and the most recent emacs mac version by YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu.

I wrote YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu, the Emacs for mac developer, and his response is

> The backtrace shows that the stack is used up because some deeply

> nested Lisp data structure is recursively traversed in garbage

> collection (or possibly an unknown bug in the GC code). In normal OSX

> applications, the stack depth for the main thread is set to 8MiB by

> default, and Emacs slightly enlarges it to 8720000B (on 64-bit binary)

> by some formula in src/emacs.c:

> 817 long newlim;

> 818 extern size_t re_max_failures;

> 819 /* Approximate the amount regex.c needs per unit of re_max_failures. */

> 820 int ratio = 20 * sizeof (char *);

> 821 /* Then add 33% to cover the size of the smaller stacks that regex.c

> 822 successively allocates and discards, on its way to the maximum. */

> 823 ratio += ratio / 3;

> 824 /* Add in some extra to cover

> 825 what we're likely to use for other reasons. */

> 826 newlim = re_max_failures * ratio + 200000;

> Probably you can tweak the ratio value above and see if it mitigates

> the problem.

I am unable to follow this suggestion (cannot compile emacs on my Mac), but perhaps it's useful to someone else.

Here is the bug report itself:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In GNU Emacs 24.3.2 (x86_64-apple-darwin11.4.2, Carbon Version 1.6.0 AppKit 1138.51)

of 2013-11-08 on Yukikaze.local

Windowing system distributor `Apple Inc.', version 10.9.0

Configured using:

`configure '--with-mac' '--enable-mac-app=/Users/xin/Documents/emacs-mac-port/build' '--prefix=/Users/xin/Documents/emacs-mac-port/build''

Important settings:

locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

default enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: Dired by name

Minor modes in effect:

delete-selection-mode: t

display-time-mode: t

auto-image-file-mode: t

shell-dirtrack-mode: t

tooltip-mode: t

mac-mouse-wheel-mode: t

tool-bar-mode: t

menu-bar-mode: t

file-name-shadow-mode: t

global-font-lock-mode: t

font-lock-mode: t

blink-cursor-mode: t

auto-composition-mode: t

auto-encryption-mode: t

auto-compression-mode: t

buffer-read-only: t

line-number-mode: t

transient-mark-mode: t

abbrev-mode: t

Recent input:

Recent messages:

Loading .session...done

For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a. [2 times]

ls does not support --dired; see `dired-use-ls-dired' for more details.

Quit

Move: 1 of 2

Move: 2 of 2

Move: 2 files

Deleting...done

Making completion list...

Load-path shadows:

None found.

Features:

(shadow vm-reply vm-pcrisis vcard u-vm-color smtpmail w3m browse-url doc-view jka-compr image-mode w3m-hist w3m-fb w3m-ems w3m-ccl ccl w3m-favicon w3m-image w3m-proc w3m-util mairix vm-rfaddons vm-page vm-minibuf emacsbug dired-aux info view cal-china lunar solar cal-dst cal-bahai cal-islam cal-julian cal-hebrew holidays hol-loaddefs mule-util cal-move goto-addr thingatpt cal-x em-unix em-term term disp-table ehelp electric em-script em-prompt em-ls em-hist em-pred em-glob em-dirs em-cmpl em-basic em-banner em-alias esh-var esh-io esh-cmd esh-opt esh-ext esh-proc esh-arg eldoc esh-groups eshell esh-module esh-mode esh-util srecode/srt-mode semantic/analyze semantic/sort semantic/scope semantic/analyze/fcn semantic/format srecode/template srecode/srt-wy semantic/wisent semantic/wisent/wisent semantic/ctxt srecode/ctxt semantic/tag-ls semantic/find srecode/compile srecode/dictionary srecode/table srecode/map srecode semanticdb-matlab semantic/db semantic/util-modes semantic/util semantic semantic/tag semantic/lex semantic/fw mode-local cedet eieio-base eieio-opt help-mode speedbar sb-image ezimage dframe find-func cedet-matlab matlab derived tempo matlab-load osx-osascript message-x server url url-proxy url-privacy url-expand url-methods url-history url-cookie url-domsuf url-util mailcap telnet dired-efap bbdb-vcard-export bbdb-print sendmail flyspell message mml mml-sec mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mail-utils gmm-utils mailheader bbdb-vm vm-virtual vm-summary-faces vm-pop utf7 vm-imap vm-thread vm-mime vm-mouse vm-toolbar vm-menu vm-window vm-folder vm-crypto vm-summary vm-motion vm-undo vm-misc vm-message vm-macro bbdb-snarf mail-extr rfc822 bbdb-com mailabbrev bbdb-autoloads bbdb timezone ffap url-parse url-vars auto-capitalize dired-x cl-macs gv rect-mark preview-latex tex-site auto-loads delsel appt cus-edit wid-edit dictionary link connection icalendar diary-lib diary-loaddefs cal-menu calendar cal-loaddefs rect ediff-merg ediff-diff ediff-wind ediff-help ediff-util ediff-mult ediff-init ediff dired ispell easymenu ibuffer edmacro kmacro vm-autoloads vm-vars vm-version vm session uniquify warnings time image-file cus-start cus-load password cl tramp tramp-compat auth-source eieio byte-opt bytecomp byte-compile cconv gnus-util mm-util mail-prsvr password-cache tramp-loaddefs shell pcomplete comint ansi-color ring format-spec advice help-fns cl-lib advice-preload time-date tooltip ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type mwheel mac-win tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list newcomment lisp-mode register page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax facemenu font-core frame cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev minibuffer loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote mac multi-tty make-network-process emacs)

An abbreviated backtrace:

Last login: Sun Dec 1 15:52:10 on ttys000

udp003015uds:~ $ lldb /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

Current executable set to '/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs' (x86_64).

(lldb) run

Process 5425 launched: '/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs' (x86_64)

Process 5425 stopped and restarted: thread 1 received signal: SIGCHLD