[gclist] What wrong with the GC in xemacs

[Daniel Barlow]

>|   reading your mail and the whole 200 message folder should be sitting
>|   quiescent in swap, it's still getting paged in.
>
>it isn't unless you select that buffer.  

*Something* is.  Emacs is noticeably slower when that vm buffer is
there, unused, than it is when it isn't.  If it's not the buffer
itself, maybe there is other data that vm is using to do its job, that
also takes up significant space?

>Emacs does not return allocated Lisp Object memory to the system.  this is
>a recognized problem.  however, it is an issue of implementation, not a GC
>issue.

Which is exactly what this thread was about, no?  I don't recall the
exact words which started it, but the discussion was certainly along
the lines of `people's impressions of gc are adverselg influenced by
emacs, so let's look at it and see what's wrong with it'.  

The particular post I responded to suggested that not much was wrong
with emacs gc; I responded to assert that something definitely _is_.

Daniel
-- 
http://ftp.linux.org.uk/~barlow/, dan@detached.demon.co.uk, PGP key ID 5F263625

 ``Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative''      --- Oscar Wilde