bug#43876: Emacs uses excessive memory

[Naveed Chehrazi]

Hi Eli,

I use emacs to write academic papers. This means that the follow packages/modes are generally active:

• auctex
• reftex
• flyspell
• company
• pdf-view (using pdftools)
• Ebib
• Org

I often have 3 to 4 emacs window/frame open for many days. Emacs uses normal amount of memory initially but after three or four days, the amount of memory it has used has grown enormously. I have not changed the settings of the garbage collector. Its current value is:

gc-cons-threshold is a variable defined in ‘C source code’.
Its value is 800000

I can run tests on my machine if you think that would be helpful.

Best regards,

Naveed

On Fri, Oct 9, 2020 at 1:58 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

merge 43876 43389
thanks

> From: Naveed Chehrazi <nchehrazi@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2020 19:53:02 -0500
>
> I had two instances where my emacs was using an excessive amount of memory (once about 45GiB, and
> once using 94GiB). I have the memory-profiler report below. It appears that helm package is the cause,

Please disregard the profiler results: it doesn't measure memory
consumption, not at all.

What would be beneficial for this and similar bug reports (see
bug#43389) is to describe what you are doing when memory footprint of
the Emacs process grows significantly.  That might give some ideas
about where to look for the culprit(s).

Do you have some customizations that change gc-cons-threshold?