Re: Garbage collector: is 800kb a good default?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dmitrii Korobeinikov <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2020 17:59:04 +0600
> 
> So, as far as I can see, defaulting to a higher threshold with an idle
> timer could yield better user experience with practically no
> significant tradeoffs. Is there something I might be missing here?

Two things: (1) the timer will not run as long as Emacs is running
some prolonged calculation, which could produce a lot of garbage; and
(2) you seem to ignore the increased memory pressure on the rest of
the system from the growing memory footprint of Emacs.  On GNU/Linux,
Emacs doesn't really return malloc'ed memory to the system, so once
the memory footprint grows, it more or less stays that way even after
GC.

Now, I'm not saying that we cannot or shouldn't increase the default
GC threshold, but we must keep these two aspects in mind while
discussing this.