Re: Emacs bzr memory footprint

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:24:25 +0200
> From: Carsten Mattner <address@hidden>
> 
> I've been wondering whether it's normal for Emacs to start with
> 10 or 20 megs and stay at ~100 megs after opening and closing
> multiple buffers.

It depends on what you mean by "opening and closing".  My Emacs
session is running for 19 hours and its current footprint is 187MB,
but it has 273 buffers of various sizes.  This is on a 32-bit machine.

So please show a minimal sequence of commands that bring you from 20MB
up to 100MB.  Please also tell what platform is this on (64-bit hosts
are expected to use more memory than 32-bit hosts).

> Does Emacs have some kind of memory reclaim or gc mechanism?

Of course, Emacs includes garbage collector.  It runs automatically,
but you can also invoke it manually with "M-x garbage-collect RET".

> Speaking about memory, I've always wondered why mmap is listed
> as not enabled by configure.

I think mmap is always used if available and workable.  The configure
script includes a test for it, it announces itself as "checking for
working mmap".  Does this test fail for you?  If so, look in
config.log for the reasons.