Re: [Maxima-discuss] gcl memory usage

[David S. <d.s...@go...>]

Maybe you're right, Robert.

But I still think that Gunter may have misinterpreted GCL_MEM_MULTIPLE.
If, as stated in his comment, memory usage becomes a problem in multi-user
environments, then I think it's the sysadmin's responsibility to restrict
memory usage of *all* the processes of each user. At least on Linux, this
is possible.
Limiting only Maxima's memory consumption to an (arbitrarily chosen)
fraction if total memory doesn't seem like the right solution. And it
prevents me from using all memory if I really need/want to.

Best regards
David Scherfgen

Sent from my mobile phone. / Von meinem Handy aus gesendet.


Robert Dodier <rob...@gm...> schrieb am Mo., 23. Apr. 2018,
16:57:

> On 2018-04-23, David Scherfgen via Maxima-discuss <
> max...@li...> wrote:
>
> > export GCL_MEM_MULTIPLE=0.2
> >
> > ... does what it is intended to do.
> >
> > According to his comment, this is supposed to influence the garbage
> > collection behavior.
> > But according to
> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gcl-devel/2017-09/msg00000.html, this
> > actually limits Maxima's total memory usage to 20% of RAM. On a system
> with
> > 5 GB of RAM, Maxima will see only 1 GB.
> >
> > I don't think it's a good idea to artificially limit RAM usage. If need
> to
> > work on a huge problem and have lots of RAM, I want Maxima to be able to
> > make use of that RAM.
>
> I haven't been following this topic closely. But in general, it's not
> clear that making additional memory available to Maxima is really
> helpful. In my experience, Maxima runs out of memory by attempting to
> constructing a small number (maybe one) of enormous expressions.
> Allocating additional memory would only make it possible to run longer
> until that got used up too.
>
> I don't remember encountering problems with Maxima running out of memory
> because I wanted to work on 10^9 small expressions and Maxima could only
> handle 10^8 or something like that.
>
> That said, I don't know what is the optimal setting for memory
> parameters for various implementations, and as always, YMMV.
>
> best
>
> Robert Dodier
>
>
>
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