Re: Opportunistic GC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Pip Cet <pipcet@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2021 07:20:28 +0000
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> My implementation proposal would be to pipe(), fork(), run GC, then
> send through the pipe the Lisp_Objects which can be collected by the
> original Emacs.

What happens when, on a 8GB machine, we have an Emacs session with a
5GB memory footprint, and you fork and start marking (which triggers
copy-on-write)?

Also, I quite frequently need to run Emacs on a system where I'm
forbidden to run more than 2 processes simultaneously ("make -j3"
aborts with an error message), and you propose to take those two
processes with 2 copies of Emacs?

IOW, I don't believe this scales well enough.

> Eli, would this qualify as a "small" GC change, and thus be vetoed?

I don't yet see how it is a good idea to begin with.  I'm probably
missing something.