Since 2006-10-28, someone has broken `Face-frob-property'

[Nix]

On 18 Dec 2006, Aidan Kehoe uttered the following:
>  Ar an t-ochtú lá déag de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Stephen J. Turnbull: 
>  > Nix writes:
>  >  >   RSS    VSZ
>  >  > 76043  82104
>  >  > 
>  >  > Yet half an hour later, after reading 500-odd posts on the
>  >  > spamassassin mailing list in Gnus:
>  >  > 
>  >  >   RSS    VSZ
>  >  > 275404 287840
>  >  > 
>  >  > Half of this appears unused. I'm going to get some stats out
>  >  > of malloc() next, to see if arena fragmentation is at fault.
>  >  > 
>  >  > (show-memory-usage)
>  >  > 110,106,054
>  > 
>  > The reported memory doesn't seem unreasonable; Gnus conses like it's
>  > going out of style.  (Yeah, I know you'd like to go back to 2-word
>  > conses and save 15% of that, but that's not in the cards.)

The bloat does not stop, though. I've tried keeping going, and half an
hour later XEmacs gets killed because it's run out of memory. If I add
some swap, an hour after that, it dies because it's run out of *addres
space*.

I think you'll agree that 2Gb is a little unreasonable for two or three
hours of Gnus usage? (It gets *dog* slow before that, then, too, but
I'd expect that: dcache utilization must be awful.)

>  > Is this an Xft build?  It's hard to get Xt/Xlib stats, as you know,
>  > but Xft does provide some hooks for its memory usage.
>
> Nix seems to use XFT builds primarily right now. I see the same behaviour on
> a non-KKCC build with server-side fonts--my solution so far has been:

It's Xft, but I just did a really crude test:

(loop for i upfrom 1 to 50000 do (progn (message "foo") (redisplay-echo-are)))

and there were no additional allocations, so it's not (purely) font
rendering that's at fault.
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> but that?s a long way from being the Right Thing. On the TTY build I
> normally use for reading mail, it leaks, but not as badly: 
>
>     VSZ  RSZ
>   44604  39m 

That's more like my *starting* RSS :)

> I don?t use KKCC in general, because it has been less responsive for me than
> the old GC. If I remember correctly, however, its summaries of memory usage
> were more accurate, to some extent.  

I'm going to hack up dmalloc to give me some mappings from leaked Lisp
allocation to allocating entity, and then have a dig. Once it's leaked
hard enough 50%+ of the arena has been leaked, so finding a leaked
allocation shouldn't be too hard...)

-- 
`He accused the FSF of being "something of a hypocrit", which
 shows that he neither understands hypocrisy nor can spell.'
   --- jimmybgood