[Maxima-discuss] gcl memory usage

[Gunter K. <gu...@pe...>]

Dear all,

I have just changed maxima to make gcl's garbage collector default to be
aggressive enough that maxima's testbench succeeds on my system (4
Gigabytes of RAM) of the system is in single-user mode.

One thing I wasn't sure about is:

The garbage collector of gcl can be told to which percentage of the
physical memory installed in the system it should try to limit the
memory usage. It seems to take in account if several instances of gcl
are running at the same time. But if firefox and thunderbird occupy 51%
of the system and maxima 50% - that causes loads of swapping, at last.

The rationale behind this behavior seems to be that each call to the
garbage collector needs time.

I am thinking about setting the default for gcl's garbage collector for
maxima so that it can kick in already if 15% of the installed physically
memory is used.

Does anyone veto that?

As far as I can see this is a speed-versus-multitasking tradeoff and in
this tradeoff I am against out-of-memories.

Thanks a lot,
and kind regards,

     Gunter.