Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!mrd From: mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Michael DeCorte) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs Subject: garbage collection Message-ID: Date: 14 Feb 89 04:24:48 GMT Sender: news@sun.soe.clarkson.edu Organization: Clarkson University, Postdam NY Lines: 39 I have a question about the garbage collection routines in Gnu Emacs. When a garbage collection occurs exactly what part of the lisp data are searched. To be more specific; as you can't tell the difference between code and data in lisp I would like to know if everything is searched. Eg. If I load up Gnus to read my news and exit gnus. After a few hours I have not entered gnus but I have had several garbage collections. Was the memory occupied by 1) gnus lisp code 2) gnus data code searched during all of the garbage collections, some of them (which ones), none of them? The reason I ask is because as we all know Emacs is a bit well... memory hungry. Now this isn't so bad if most of the memory is paged out to disk and just sits there until actually used, (eg. if I am using mh-e there isn't any reason that gnus has to be in my real memory) but I am finding that after running emacs for a long time it grows a lot (expected) and the amount of paging on my poor little 3/50's seems to increase (even though it shouldn't). So, is my worst nightmare true? Emacs searches though every little grubby bit of lisp anything everytime it has to do a garbage collection and thereby is distroying my poor little 50's? -- Michael DeCorte // (315)265-2439 // P.O. Box 652, Potsdam, NY 13676 Internet: mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu // Bitnet: mrd@clutx.bitnet --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Clarkson Archive Server // commands = help, index, send, path archive-server@sun.soe.clarkson.edu archive-server%sun.soe.clarkson.edu@omnigate.bitnet dumb1!dumb2!dumb3!smart!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!archive-server ---------------------------------------------------------------------------