Re: 50MB large auto-save file after Emacs crash

[Stephen Berman]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2005 10:43:05 +0200 Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

>> From: Stephen Berman <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 08:27:29 +0100
>> 
>> A few weeks ago, while using a current CVS build, Emacs suddenly
>> crashed and vanished without a trace.  At the moment of the crash I
>> was using Gnus and scrolling an article buffer with the mouse wheel.
>> Since I was not running under gdb, I couldn't retrieve a backtrace or
>> anything else to make a useful bug report.
>
> There could be something else useful on your system: the SYSLOG
> files.  It sounds like you are running a Gnu/Linux box, so please look
> in the SYSLOG files (if you don't know where or how, please read the
> relevant man pages first), and try to find any messages related to the
> crashed Emacs session.

Unfortunately, there is nothing unusual in any log file around the
time of the timestamp of the auto-save file, which I assume is close
to the time of the crash.

> Also, please make sure your shell setup doesn't disable core dumps
> (with a ulimit command).

My system is in fact set up not to create core files, but I can change
that.  Can you recommend a reasonable maximum size?

> In general, if Emacs crashes, it should leave behind a core dump file;
> if core files are not disabled, then it's possible that Emacs was
> either killed by the OS (thus the advice to look in SYSLOG), or it
> simply exited.

It appears in this case to be the latter.  FWIW, I still have the
auto-save file, but even compressed it's bigger than 13MB, so I don't
want to attach it.  Anyway, I doubt it's useful, but just to get an
idea of it, I've attached the first 95 lines.

Steve Berman

auto-save-top
Description: first 95 lines of auto-save file