Re: Debugging memory leaks/stale references

[Simon Josefsson]

Florian Weimer <address@hidden> writes:

> I've decided that it's time to track down an annoying bug in Gnus (or
> Emacs).  The symptom is that memory-limit keeps growing and growing,
> but the data segment size (as allocated from the operating system)
> remains approximately constant.  In my case, this behavior is exposed
> mainly when entering large NNTP groups with Gnus.
>
> Is it possible to dump all reachable Lisp objects to a file, in the
> format that is returned by princ?  I could run diff(1) on two versions
> of the file, and this might reveal which objects are leaking (or held
> by stale references).  garbage-collect output alone is not very
> helpful.
>
> (I'm going to test CVS Emacs soon, just to be sure that the behavior
> is still the same.  It's probably a Gnus bug, but you never know.)

I'm using CVS Emacs, and can confirm that the behavior is the same.
When I notice that emacs feel sluggish, it is often the case that ps
report that emacs is using nearly all physical amount memory (1GB
here).  Tracking down this would be good.  I think someone said that
disabling the gnus agent at least reduce the problem.