Re: [Gcl-devel] GCL memory allocation/gc environment variables (was Re: [Maxima-discuss] Maxima testsuite with GCL)

[Raymond Toy]

>>>>> "Camm" == Camm Maguire <address@hidden> writes:

    Camm> Greetings!
    Camm> Variable            Type   Default  Description

    Camm> GCL_MEM_MULTIPLE    float  1.0      fraction of runtime ram to 
consider

That seems really, really unfriendly of gcl to have that as the
default.  Gobbling up all available ram if you can doesn't seem nice.

If you must have a heuristic, a default low value would make more
sense, with a lower bound of 256MB or 512 MB or something that's
reasonably large to do useful things, but not obnoxiously large.

Cmucl is quite happy running maxima and the testsuite with just 512 MB
of heap, and is more than enough to compile all of lapack to boot.

My (very limited) understanding of GCes is that you do need to collect
at reasonable rates.  If you're generating huge amounts of garbage,
you don't want to wait until you've used up 16GB of memory and then
spend the next several seconds or minutes removing all of this
garbage.  Doesn't make for a very friendly user experience to have
such huge pauses.

--
Ray