From: Douglas Merrill
Subject: Running out of memory in Common Lisp 4.0
Date: 
Message-ID: <DOUG.91Jun20164559@clarity.princeton.edu>
We just started running Lucid Common Lisp 4.0 under SunOS 4.1.1, and
have been having problems with running out of memory, garbage
collection failures, and bus errors.  Our network includes a Sun 4/280
fileserver and several SparcStation2's -- recently upgraded.  Each
SparcStation has about 32Mb of swap space.

When running lisp code which formerly (under Lucid CL 3.0) worked for
even very large datasets, we are finding that it now runs out of
memory even with smaller ones.  Usually it terminates with a message
like this:

;;; Failed to re-enable EGC after the memory manager disabled it for memory
;;; reorganization:
;;;  EGC could not be enabled because the dynamic GC is disabled.
>>Error: GC and EGC disabled: not enough storage after GC.  CONSers
         are now using the storage normally reserved for copying
         currently allocated dynamic storage. 


and sometimes even:


;;; Ran out of Memory during GC
Process lisp stopped (signal)


Our best guess is that garbage collection is simply failing to get rid
of things it needs to get rid of, because
  1) We've run bigger things on the earlier version
  2) It shouldn't break with this kind of fatal error if it is working
     correctly.

Has anyone else encountered a similar problem?  Has a bug fix been
published to correct this problem?

Please email any suggestions or answers to ···@clarity.Princeton.EDU
(I'm posting this for him.)

If there's enough interest, I'll post a summary to the net.

Douglas Merrill
····@clarity.princeton.edu
Princeton Univ.
Cognitive Science Lab