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

From: Jean Louis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2020 04:28:26 +0300

* Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> [2020-12-10 21:46]:
> Stefan, please help with this complex issue (or maybe several
> issues).  We have collected some evidence in this bug report, but I
> don't yet see where is this going, or how to make any real progress
> here.
> 
> One thing that I cannot explain is this:
> 
> > From: Trevor Bentley <[email-masked]>
> > Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
> >  [email-masked], [email-masked]
> > Cc: 
> > Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2020 22:50:37 +0100
> > 
> > I've been too busy to modify emacs to print garbage collects, but 
> > these still show really long (garbage-collect) calls, often 
> > exceeding 15 minutes.
> 
> Trevor reported several times that automatic GC is fast as usual, but
> manual invocations of "M-x garbage-collect" take much longer, many
> minutes.  I don't understand how this could happen, because both
> methods of invoking GC do exactly the same job.

My observation over time is that that running M-x garbage-collect
created the same effect just as when I observed that Emacs starts
doing something with hard disk and continues so for unpredicted number
of minutes. Normally so long until I kill it. It could be 10-20
minutes that I have waited. So that could be where the problem lies.

Something happens inside of Emacs, automatic garbage-collect is
invoked which cannot soon finish its job.

About 2 times I invoked garbage-collect manually and caused about
visually same behavior to take place. I hope you understand this
explanation.