Re: Emacs bzr memory footprint

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:13:55 +0200
> From: Carsten Mattner <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> "opening and closing" means loading some source file (C, Erlang,
> Text, Haskell, M4, something else) and maybe erc-tls. Then after nuking
> all buffers and emacs using minimum 100 megs I wondered why no
> gc kicked in to reduce it by at least 30 megs (random number).

Don't forget that visiting all these files invoked the corresponding
major and minor modes, which were then loaded by Emacs, and that
consumes memory.  Emacs does not unload packages automatically, so
that memory continues to be in use even if you kill the buffers.

In addition, there are internal buffers and data structures, such as
load-history, which grow for as long as your session is up, and are
not shrunk when you kill buffers.

I don't know if several tens of MBs can be explained by this, but some
of them surely can.

> Are there known leaks with erlang-mode or haskell-mode?

There can be no memory leak on the Lisp side.  Any leaks are always
bugs in Emacs, not in any Lisp code that it runs.