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

[Carlos O'Donell]

On 11/22/20 3:16 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2020 22:52:14 +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
>>
>> I am now following this strategy here:
>> https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc/wiki/Use-Case%3A-Leak-Checking
> 
> That uses a different implementation of malloc, so I'm not sure it
> will help us.

Correct, that is a different malloc implementation and may have
completely different behaviour for your given workload. That is
not to say that it isn't viable solution to try another allocator
that matches your workload. However, in this bug we're trying to
determine why the "default" configuration of emacs and glibc's
allocator causes memory usage to grow.

We want to run the glibc malloc algorithms because that is the
implementation under which we are observing the increased memory
pressure. The tracer I've suggested will get us an API trace
that we can use to determine if it is actually API calls that
are causing an increase in the memory usage or if it's an
algorithmic issue. It is not always obvious to see from the
API calls, but having the trace is better than not.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.