[gclist] What wrong with the GC in xemacs

[David Chase]

> |   *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?

> I don't know.  the problem does not seem to happen on my system (SPARC,
> SunOS 4.1.3, 32M RAM, 128M swap.  my Emacs is now 60M large with 1300
> buffers, and I experience no perceivable degradation in response time or
> paging behavior while composing this message or doing other work).

I'm not 100% certain of this, but I'd also suspect variances in the 
underlying OS and its paging algorithms.  SunOS 4.1.3 has always 
struck me as a relatively good citizen in that respect, but this 
was not always true of earlier versions of Unix-like OSes, and may 
not be true of other current versions of Unix-like OSes.  Do remember,
these garbage collectors do not run in a vacuum (see all that work 
on cache and GC interactions, for instance).

(Unix, or perhaps UNIX, is a trademark of whoever happens to own 
it this week.)

David