Re: It's almost 2016 and when (single-threaded) Emacs hangs, you gotta be smashing your keyboard!

[MBR]

On 11/19/15 7:36 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
> P.S. Emacs has been rock solid for me for the last decade.  I can't
> remember the last time I experienced an emacs crash.  Bugs in
> behavior?  Sure.  But no crashes.
I tend to leave my Emacs sessions open forever.  Back in the 1990s on 
Solaris or AIX, Emacs would stay up for months at a time.  I'd only shut 
it down when I had to power-cycle the machine.  From about 2000 to 2012 
my primary machines were Windows, and my experience with the Windows 
version of Emacs was pretty similar.  A couple of years ago when I 
switched to a Mac, I compiled Emacs 24.3.1 from source, and I've been 
using it regularly since then.  But although my experience with this 
version is good, it's not as crash-proof as I was used to with earlier 
Emacses.  I seem to encounter either hangs (the multi-colored spinner 
spins and Activity Monitor reports Emacs as "not responding") or 
outright crashes (a dialog box appears saying Emacs has to exit and 
asking if I want to restart Emacs) once or twice a month.

I do have a nasty habit of having a zillion Emacs buffers open at once, 
and I usually also have an instance of Firefox running at the same time 
in which I typically have about 20 windows open with approx. 10 tabs in 
each window.  I've just been chalking the more frequent Emacs crashes 
and hangs up to running out of memory.  But this is a pretty fully 
configured laptop, and it's got 16 GB of RAM.  Should I be looking 
elsewhere for the cause?

   Mark Rosenthal