Re: [Maxima-discuss] gcl memory usage

[Raymond T. <toy...@gm...>]

>>>>> "Gunter" == Gunter Königsmann <gu...@pe...> writes:

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

    Gunter> One thing I wasn't sure about is:

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

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

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

Seems reasonable.  But I don't know what the typical amount of
installed memory.  Most of my personal machines have just 8GB or 16
GB, but some quite a bit less, like my Raspberry Pi with just 1
GB. (Haven't try running maxima there, but it should work with some
appropriate lisp, I think.)

gcl's decision to consume all available memory before GCing seems very
unfriendly, and would seem to make the GC pause huge.

--
Ray