Re: text-edit-dialog-item.lisp

[bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair)]

>REGARDING                text-edit-dialog-item.lisp
>We're having some problems with code that uses the file
>text-edit-dialog-item.lisp 
>in the examples folder.  Basically, every now and again it crashes with a
>System 
>error 25 (can't allocate requested memory).  Before we spend lots of time
>trying
>to track this down (it's such fun trying to track down a bug that takes
>about 5
>minutes to duplicate and then leaves you in the system debugger which is no
>help in
>trying to find out what piece of Lisp code was running when it crashed), I
>thought
>I'd ask the people on this list if anyone else using the text edit code has
>run into
>this problem.  At this point, we don't really know whether it's our code or
>the
>system code which is at fault.  However, since the code in
>text-edit-dialog-item.lisp
>calls system traps a lot more often than our code, I tend to be suspicious
>about
>that code.  

Sounds like you're running out of Mac Heap. I know that MCL running
with the default size of 3072K and the default Mac heap percentage
ends up with only about 78K of free space in the Mac heap. If
you use a lot of text-edit-dialog-items with largish amounts of
text (anywhere near the 32K limit), you'll fill up that memory
fast. This will not pose a problem in MCL 2.0 final, as it is able
to grow the Mac heap dynamically. 2.0b1, however, statically allocates
the Mac heap at startup time. Hence, you need to increase the amount
of memory given to the Mac heap. To do this, you can either up the
total space given to MCL with the Finder's "Get Info" dialog and/or use
ResEdit to edit MCL's LSIZ resource. Try changing the "Initial Mac
Heap minimum size" from 128000 to 256000 or higher.