GNU bug report logs -
#45200
Wishlist: There should be a `malloc-trim' function
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Reported by: Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel <at> yandex.ru>
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2020 18:44:02 UTC
Severity: wishlist
Fixed in version 29.1
Done: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.
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Message #80 received at 45200 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):
On Tue, 2021-01-26 at 16:55 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel <at> yandex.ru>
> > Cc: 45200 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca
> > Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2021 01:28:01 +0300
> >
> > On Mon, 2021-01-25 at 17:17 -0500, DJ Delorie wrote:
> > > Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:
> > > > Thanks, but is it really a good idea to call malloc_trim each time we
> > > > free some chunk of memory?
> > >
> > > malloc_trim() is very expensive relative to free(), partly because of
> > > what it needs to do, and partly because it flushes the fastbins cache.
> > > If you call it every, say, 1000 iterations of free, that might suffice.
> > > Or perhaps after each GC run.
> >
> > (un-ccing Glibc maintainers as this question is Emacs-specific)
>
> Please don't, I invited them to these discussions because they can
> help us make the right decisions.
Sorry, okay.
> > After a GC run, would that be at the end of `garbage_collect` function as
> > Stefan
> > mentioned?
>
> That'd be easy to implement, but I'm not yet sure it's the best
> alternative. In particular, I'd like to have some idea regarding how
> much time such a call could take. In some usage patterns Emacs calls
> GC very frequently, which slows down command execution and makes Emacs
> less responsive. So much so that some people raise the GC threshold
> too high trying to avoid this slowdown, and raising the threshold too
> much is generally not a good idea. I don't want us to slow GC down
> even more so that more people would shoot themselves in the foot by
> raising the threshold.
Yeah, that's true, there's an existing advice to make GC only run on idle. Which is the reason btw this bugreport eventually came to life ☺
This bug report was last modified 3 years and 78 days ago.
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