50MB large auto-save file after Emacs crash

[Stephen Berman]

A few weeks ago, while using a current CVS build, Emacs suddenly
crashed and vanished without a trace.  At the moment of the crash I
was using Gnus and scrolling an article buffer with the mouse wheel.
Since I was not running under gdb, I couldn't retrieve a backtrace or
anything else to make a useful bug report.  The only remarkable
remnant was the auto-save file: it was 50 megabytes big and glancing
through it, it looked like it contained (at least) the entire buffer
history of the session prior to the crash, in a combination of plain
text and binary or byte-code; perhaps a resident memory dump?  I've
never seen this before and it has not recurred since then (I've also
cvs upped more than once in the mean time), but I wanted to mention
it, in case it rings a bell for anyone.

Steve Berman

Currently
In GNU Emacs 22.0.50.7 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.8.7)
 of 2005-12-09 on escher
X server distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.60802000
configured using `configure '--with-x-toolkit=gtk''