Re: ANNOUNCEMENT and WARNING: ben-mule-21-5 is now offially mergedin.

On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Daniel Pittman wrote: [...] [...] That should have been 59,236 /kilo/ bytes. :) ...and on further investigation, this is actually worse than I thought. I sat through a full startup with Ben-MULE. This means that my code did a whole bunch of face manipulation, loaded a number of things including BBDB, CC-mode, did a bit of byte-compiling, then started Gnus. No garbage collection occurred between the drop described above and the completion of loading of Gnus -- it seems that .xemacs/init.el is run with garbage collection disabled. This is suboptimal, IMO, because it results in a much larger fragmented image when the init process is done. Anyway, this startup run had a peak image size of around 485MB, dropping down to 125MB or so when it did a GC pass after the init file had finished. Sadly I can't track down exactly *where* this memory allocation is coming from. The closest I can get is that it centers around the set of calls `Ffuncall', `Feval', `execute_optimized_program' and `funcall_compiled_function'. Obviously this is the core loop of the Lisp engine. I can't for the life of me see what, if anything, in there is causing this bloom in memory usage, though. Worse still, none of the information that I can extract from the memory profiler[1] seems to account for it -- it looks like those functions are (recursively) doing the needed allocation directly, not calling sub-functions which do it. :( I can't really test beyond this point at the moment, partly because I should do some real work and partly because I am out of ideas as to what more I /can/ do to trace down this problem. Er, does anyone out there know of a memory allocation tracing tool that works with Linux and XEmacs? Other, sadly, than Purify, which I have no license for. Daniel Footnotes: [1] memprof, a Linux-based tool, run against the lined xemacs. -- The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it. -- Edward Dowling