Re: Opportunistic GC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Pip Cet <pipcet@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2021 14:57:06 +0000
> Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > 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)?
> 
> That is, indeed, one of the cases in which we have to use the
> synchronous GC or suffer the consequences.

How do we know if/when we are in that case?  Because if we err, we
have a meeting with the OOM killer and a swift death.

> > 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?
> 
> That is, indeed, one of the cases in which we have to use synchronous GC.

Again, how do we know we are in that case?