Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!nic.MR.NET!xanth!uunet!steinmetz!vdsvax!montnaro From: montnaro@sprite.steinmetz.ge.com (Skip Montanaro) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs Subject: Re: garbage collection Message-ID: Date: 15 Feb 89 06:16:50 GMT References: Sender: news@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com Reply-To: (Skip Montanaro) Organization: GE Corporate Research & Development Lines: 15 In-reply-to: mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu's message of 14 Feb 89 04:24:48 GMT Michel DeCorte asked some garbage collection questions. I don't have any answers, but I have what I think is a related question. I keep Emacs running in a window on my Sun for long periods. Normally, I'm just doing the usual text editing sort of things. Occasionally I have to edit a really huge file -- many megabytes -- and Emacs gladly mallocs virtual memory to get space for the file. Unfortunately, when I'm finished editing such a file and have deleted its buffer, Emacs seems to not give the space back to the operating system (no matter how many times I garbage collect). I'm often left with so little free virtual memory that I can't run other jobs. I must kill the Emacs session to free up the space. Is this a bug in Emacs or a feature of the malloc/free system (or something else that isn't obvious to me?) -- Skip Montanaro (montanaro@sprite.steinmetz.ge.com, montanaro@ge-crd.arpa)