Re: Does Emacs return memory to the system on Mac OS X or *BSD?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Thu, 11 May 2017 08:29:31 -0400
> 
> >> IOW the only difference is in the fact that it requires more swap space,
> >> which can occasionally be noticeable, e.g. when you don't have swap
> >> space at all.
> > No, it also means that part of the VM address space is in use and
> > cannot be used by other apps.
> 
> What do you mean by "VM address space"?

That pages mapped into some process's address space diminish the total
amount of VM which the system can allocate, even if those pages are
swapped out of physical memory.  Only unmapping them from the
process's address space will make them available for use by other
processes.