(maxima.info)Garbage Collection

---

Next: Introduction to Program Flow Prev: Lisp and Maxima Up: Program Flow

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

37.2 Garbage Collection
=======================

Symbolic computation tends to create a good deal of garbage (temporary
or intermediate results that are eventually not used), and effective
handling of this can be crucial to successful completion of some
programs.

   Under GCL, on UNIX systems where the mprotect system call is
available (including SUN OS 4.0 and some variants of BSD) a stratified
garbage collection is available.  This limits the collection to pages
which have been recently written to.  See the GCL documentation under
ALLOCATE and GBC. At the Lisp level doing (setq si::*notify-gbc* t) will
help you determine which areas might need more space.

   For other Lisps that run Maxima, we refer the reader to the
documentation for that Lisp on how to control GC.