yeah, this is correct. iirc it was some sort of "autocomplete open a file" library that was running slowly, mostly because of gc -- disabling gc made that snappy, and i have enough memory that it doesn't really matter if emacs never reclaims it.

i also really don't like having my editor pause to do gc.

(i'm addicted to emacs flexibility, but i would love a better-engineered replacement. maybe xi editor, someday. (though their multiprocess approach seems _insane_ to me, _especially_ in a language that gives you safe shared-memory concurrency!))

here's the necessary incantations, in any case anyone wants to try this at home:

  ;; never collect.
  (setq gc-cons-threshold 10000000000)
  (defun garbage-collect (&rest args) 
	  (message "trying to garbage collect. probably you want to quit emacs."))
  (setq garbage-collection-messages t)

the message kicks in at 10GB.