Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> On 9/5/19 9:12 AM, Joseph Mingrone wrote:
>>> As this should fix the problem reported in Bug#37006 I'm boldly closing that bug report.
>> This issue still exists for me.  After rebuilding on 5f089ac, I re-added
>> the (setq gc-cons-threshold most-positive-fixnum) / (setq
>> gc-cons-threshold 800000) surrounding init.el (assuming the issue was
>> fixed) then when Emacs' memory usage was over 2 GB, I turned on
>> `garbage-collection-messages', opened some large files, and could see
>> that garbage collection was not happening.

> OK, reopening the bug report. I take it that all I need to do is to modify init.el as mentioned above, and then edit some large files. I'll 
> take a look at that.

That's all I had to do (on a FreeBSD 12.0 system).  I can give you an
account a FreeBSD system if that is helpful and saves you some time.