Subject: bug#43389: 28.0.50; Emacs memory leaks using hard disk all time

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 21:23:50 +0200

> From: Arthur Miller <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked],  [email-masked],
>   [email-masked],  [email-masked],  [email-masked],
>   [email-masked]
> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 19:40:23 +0100
> 
> > That doesn't sound like a memory problem to me.
> Ok; acknowledged; any idea what it could be?

Actually, I take that back: it does look like the OOM killer that
killed Emacs:

  nov 17 16:32:44 pascal kernel: oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/user.slice/user-1000.slice/[email-masked],task=emacs,pid=>
  nov 17 16:32:44 pascal kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 605 (emacs) total-vm:29305960kB, anon-rss:29035892kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:5096kB, UID:1000 pgtables:57144kB oom_score_adj:0

> I have attached you a syslog from one crash point, you can see Emacs
> is using almost 8gig or RAM, but I have 32, so there is plenty of
> unused RAM over.

It says above that the total VM size of the Emacs process was 29GB,
not 8.

So maybe yours is the same problem after all.

How about writing a simple function that reports the total VM size of
the Emacs process (via process-attributes), and running it from some
timer?  Then you could see how long it takes you to get from, say, 2GB
to more than 20GB, and maybe also take notes of what you are doing at
that time?