Subject: bug#9352: GNU/Emacs 23.3, Windows 7: Very huge .emacs-places can cause problems

From: "Christoph Conrad" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:37:44 +0200

Hi,

after several investigation i found out the reason for crashing my emacs
crashing several times today.

I use

;; Shortcut for saving desktop and saveplaces
(global-set-key (kbd "S-<f9>")
                '( lambda ()
                   (interactive)
                   (save-place-alist-to-file)
                   (desktop-save desktop-dirname)))

sometimes t save my "session". Today emacs showed me a message after
that every time, "memory exhausted", and after two or three times he
crashed repeatable.

After some time i found out that my ".emacs-places" over the years had
reached a size of nearly 50 MB. I deleted it, problem gone.

In GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt4.0.1381)
 of 2011-03-10 on 3249CTO
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 4.0.1381
configured using `configure --with-gcc (4.5) --no-opt --cflags -Ic:/imagesupport/include'

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: DEU
  value of $XMODIFIERS: nil
  locale-coding-system: cp1252
  default enable-multibyte-characters: t