Re: Lisp pointer size warning?

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

Danny Siu <dsiu@adobe.com> writes:

> Is there any lisp level stuff for tracing where the memory goes without
> resorting into gdb?

Well, the first thing you want to do is to find out what type of
object is taking most of it and whether there are vast numbers of
things on the freelists for some reason:

(garbage-collect)
  => ((462989 . 39897) (28247 . 9) (1833 . 5746) 1467501 674844 (544 . 287) (8551 . 1062) (59665 . 5414))

Obviously you can grovel the obarray and, for instance, examine the
aggregate objects in all the value slots, but you probably can't do
the job fully at the Lisp level.  There is no specific heap profiling
facility anyhow, though there is execution profiling support which
could tell you the frequency with which the various allocators are
called, and setting `garbage-collection-messages' can show up
operations which cons even more than normal for Gnus.