Re: Indentation and gc

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>
> Cc: spacibba@aol.com, arne_bab@web.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2023 14:31:18 +0000
> 
> Well. Currently, the paragraph reads like: we have 800kb default, but do
> not increase it too much because Emacs will require more memory.

No, it says more.  In particular:

                  If you specify a larger value, garbage collection will
     happen less often.  This reduces the amount of time spent garbage
     collecting, but increases total memory use.  You may want to do
     this when running a program that creates lots of Lisp data.
     However, we recommend against increasing the threshold for
     prolonged periods of time, and advise that you never set it higher
     than needed for the program to run in reasonable time.  Using
     thresholds higher than necessary could potentially cause
     system-wide memory pressure, and should therefore be avoided.

> Given that modern computer typically have 4-16Gb RAM, the warning does
> not look like an actual warning. 800kb is nothing. Surely, increasing it
> to 80Mb to even few hundreds Mb is safe, right? Or not?

Again, you are reasoning about the value as if it were related to the
maximum memory footprint Emacs could have.  But in fact, it is related
only to the _increment_ of memory Emacs can have before it should stop
and consider how much of that is garbage.