Re: Larger GC thresholds for non-interactive Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> Was there?  I see:.  https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=38345#71
> but it's a little more than a couple of months ago.
> I'm pretty curious because if I accumulate a large buffer of trace output
> (running memory up to 100s of MB), killing the buffer doesn't seem to
> impact gc time substantially.

The GC does not really look at a buffer's content, so unless there is
a non-trivial amount of text-properties (e.g. because of font-lock and
such), the GC will take about the same amount of time handling a large
buffer as handling a tiny buffer.

Similarly, whether the malloc library returns the memory to the system
or not shouldn't affect GC times very much if at all.  What does affect
GC time is the amount of live data as well as the total amount of data
that's under the GC's control (i.e. live data, garbage that still needs
to be collected, as well as data that's free but that we haven't been
able to return to malloc (via `free`)).


        Stefan