Re: Memory again

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:02:09 +0100
> 
> > It doesn't, or at least shouldn't.  When enough memory has been
> > reclaimed by GC, it should give it away to the system.  At least on
> > some systems, I actually see that in action, after killing a large
> > buffer.
> 
> Just for the record: a *compile* buffer ended with 10M lines of
> diagnostics emitted by a compiler. The emacs process jumped from 60MB to
> 526MB of RES memory.

On what OS?  And was the size of the buffer comparable with 520MB?

> That was yesterday, and emacs keeps retaining that memory.

Are you saying that you killed the *compilation* buffer and Emacs
memory footprint didn't change at all?  I find that hard to believe.

> I guess that as the buffer grew it was reallocated again and
> again. Obviously fragmentation is at play here.

If ralloc.c is used on the system where you did that, fragmentation
should be prevented, especially in buffer text reallocations.  If
ralloc.c is not used, I believe Emacs relies on the system's memory
allocation to avoid fragmentation (that's why ralloc.c is not needed
on those systems).