bug#43389: 28.0.50; Emacs memory leaks using hard disk all time

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 13:59:47 +0300
>> From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
>> Cc: fweimer@redhat.com, 43389@debbugs.gnu.org, dj@redhat.com,
>>   michael_heerdegen@web.de, trevor@trevorbentley.com, carlos@redhat.com
>> 
>> In the IceWM window manager I have visual representation of memory
>> usage and that is how I get feeling, there is also tooltip telling me
>> that more and more memory is used. When it starts to swap like 3 GB
>> then I turn on symon-mode and in Emacs I see more and more swapping.
>
> I think I described how to write an Emacs function that you could use
> to watch the vsize of the Emacs process and alert you to it being
> above some threshold.
>
>> The heap file is here 24M, maybe not needed for review:
>> https://gnu.support/files/tmp/2020-11-23/jeprof.23826.0.f.heap
>> 
>> Visualization is here 20K PDF file:
>> https://gnu.support/files/tmp/2020-11-23/jeprof.23826.0.f.heap.pdf
>> 
>> Do you see anything interesting inside that should tell about memory leaks?
>
> I'm not sure.  I think I see that you have some timer that triggers a
> lot of memory allocations because it conses a lot of Lisp objects.
> Whether that is part of the problem or not is not clear.
>
> Next time when your session causes the system to swap, please type:
>
>   M-: (garbage-collect) RET
>
> and post here the output of that (it should be a list of numbers
> whose meanings are explained in the doc string of garbage-collect).
>
> Also, I think I asked to tell how large are your buffers by evaluation
> the following (again, near the point where your session causes the
> system to page heavily):
>
>   (let ((size 0))
>     (dolist (buffer (buffer-list) size)
>       (setq size (+ size (buffer-size buffer)))))
>
> It is important to have both these pieces of information from the same
> session at the same time near the point where you must kill Emacs, so
> that we know how much memory is actually used by your session at that
> point (as opposed to memory that is "free" in the heap, but was  not
> returned to the OS).
>
> Thanks.
For me it happends like really, really fast. Things work normally, and
then suddenly everythign freezes, and after first freeze, it takes for
every to see result of any keypress. For example video in Firefox gets
slow down to like a frame per minut or so; I can see that system is
alive, but it is impossible to type something like (garbage-collect) and
see the result; I would be sitting here for a day :-). 

The only thing I can is switch to another console, and then back. By
that time Emacs process is restarted and everything is normal. I don't
use swap file at all, and I can't believe that Emacs is eating up 32 gig
or RAM either. However I can't type any command to see what it is
peeking at since everything is efefctively frozen. I have seen it at 800
meg on my machine at some time, but it is far away from 32 gig I have.