Re: Building Emacs overflowed pure space

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

       I'm guessing that Emacs needs more memory because more files are
       being loaded upon initialization (?).

   ARE additional files being loaded now at startup?
   If so, which ones -- and why?

Nothing in the changelogs seems to indicate that additional files are
being preloaded.  But several _changes_ to files that are preloaded
are constantly being made, increasing pure-bytes-used constantly.

What used to be done is that each time there was a pure space
overflow, BASE_PURESIZE got increased by 10000.  This yielded pure
space overflows every couple of months or so.  Now apparently
whenever there is a pure space overflow, BASE_PURESIZE gets
increased by 500.  This means that there will be a new pure space
overflow anywhere from a few minutes to a few days later.

Different people get somewhat different values of pure-bytes-used.
Eli was wondering that this could be caused by some bug.  I must
confess that I do not fully understand the problems (if any) involved,
but somebody suggested that the differences could be due to the way
you compile Emacs.  This may make a difference as to whether and when
cl.el gets loaded during compiling.  cl.el redefines some often used
functions, making their code longer.  This would seem consistent with
the fact that people doing `make bootstrap' seem to get a slightly
higher value than Eli, who I believe does not usually do `make bootstrap'.

Incrementing BASE_PURESIZE by increments of 500 forces people like me
who have a routinely a few tiny uncommitted change to the Emacs source
code to set SITELOAD_PURESIZE_EXTRA to some reasonable value, say 10000.

I suggest to go back to increasing BASE_PURESIZE by increments of 10000.
Any lesser value just will result in too frequent problems.

Sincerely,

Luc.