GNU bug report logs - #26952
25.2; repeated buffer insertion (e.g. yank-rectangle) consumes excessive memory (4GB+ for 90MB of text)

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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: npostavs <at> users.sourceforge.net
Cc: pot <at> gnu.org, 26952 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#26952: 25.1; loops eating all memory while yanking big rectangle
Date: Sat, 20 May 2017 20:59:44 +0300

> From: npostavs <at> users.sourceforge.net
> Cc: 26952 <at> debbugs.gnu.org,  pot <at> gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 20 May 2017 13:41:36 -0400
> 
> The following simple loop can trigger the issue (I'm now also limiting
> Emacs' memory usage to 1GB with "ulimit -Sv $((1000 * 1024))" so that it
> just throws an out of memory error instead of filling my swap and
> slowing everything down):
> 
>   (let ((str (make-string 150 ?a)))
>     (dotimes (_ (* 600 1000))
>       (insert str ?\n)))
> 
> I think it might be just an inefficient allocater (or this pattern of
> allocation happens to hit a pathological case for the allocater).  The
> master branch is using the 'hybrid' allocater, while emacs-25 is not.
> If I configure 25.2 with REL_ALLOC=yes, then it runs okay.  The only
> allocation seems to be from 'enlarge_buffer_text'.

Thanks.

So you are saying that inserting 90MB worth of text into a buffer
makes Emacs 25.2 run out of 1GB of memory, due to inefficiencies of
the malloc implementation?  (Here on Windows it produces a 230MB Emacs
session, but the Windows build uses the moral equivalent of mmap for
allocating buffer text.)

Maybe we should release Emacs 25.3 with this single problem fixed?

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