Subject: 23.1; Emacs 23 garbage collection bug (stack trace over 10,000 lines) - filebin.ca/ytkeqq
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:30:50 +0000
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

> Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug and the
    > precise symptoms of the bug:

After about a month of uptime, I encountered a bug in garbage
collection, triggered around the time of an auto-save.  I was told that
emacs was out of memory, even though I still have over 1.5 gigabytes of
RAM available.  Emacs began consuming 100% CPU while at the same time
was not doing any I/O (such as writing a corefile).  Further
investigation yields that there was some kind of bug or loop in the
garbage collection process.  What follows are my efforts to track down
information on the bug.  I've since learned further details about
debugging as suggested by M-x report-bug.  Next time this occurs I will
be able to provide more information.

The version of emacs used is emacs23_23.1+1-4~bpo50+1 within
Debian lenny-backports:

  http://packages.debian.org/lenny-backports/emacs23

Please reference

  http://filebin.ca/ytkeqq/Emacs-23-GarbageCollectionBug.txt

for the debugging information, including the very long stack trace.

This should help with the line numbers provided in the backtrace.

I hope this report will be helpful.

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    > In GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) of 2009-12-28 on
    > localhost, modified by Debian configured using `configure
    > '--build=i486-linux-gnu' '--host=i486-linux-gnu' '--prefix=/usr'
    > '--sharedstatedir=/var/lib' '--libexecdir=/usr/lib'
    > '--localstatedir=/var/lib' '--infodir=/usr/share/info'
    > '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--with-pop=no' '--without-gpm'
    > '--without-dbus'
    > '--enable-locallisppath=/etc/emacs23:/etc/emacs:/usr/local/share/emacs/23.1/site-lisp:/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/23.1/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/23.1/leim'
    > '--with-x=no' 'build_alias=i486-linux-gnu'
    > 'host_alias=i486-linux-gnu' 'CFLAGS=-DDEBIAN -g3 -Os ''

    > Important settings: value of $LC_ALL: nil value of $LC_COLLATE:
    > nil value of $LC_CTYPE: nil value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil value of
    > $LC_MONETARY: nil value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil value of $LC_TIME: nil
    > value of $LANG: nil value of $XMODIFIERS: nil
    > locale-coding-system: nil default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

    > Major mode: Lisp Interaction

    > Minor modes in effect: savehist-mode: t recentf-mode: t
    > display-time-mode: t desktop-save-mode: t shell-dirtrack-mode: t
    > menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t
    > font-lock-mode: t global-auto-composition-mode: t
    > auto-composition-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t
    > auto-compression-mode: t size-indication-mode: t
    > column-number-mode: t line-number-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t