Re: Memory-hungry problem in MCL version2.01b.

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

>Dear Sir,
>
>  We are a group of researchers at the university of sydney, working on 
>a project called Electronic 
>Discourse Analyser for Fujitsu Australia. Last year we purchased a copy of
>Macintosh Common lisp version 2.01B for our work. Recently we installed
>this system on our Macintosh IIfx, which runs under system 7, and which has
>20 megabytes of RAM. We thought with this configuration, there should be no
>memory-hungry problem with our application.
>
>  Our application has 30 thousand code lines. It also uses 6 hashtables
>which when fully loaded, consist about 2000 records. Each record takes about
>100 - 150 bytes. With MACLv1.3 and system 6, there was no problem with
>this configuration. However, when we ran our application under the new
>environment, MCLv2.01b did too frequent GCs, and sometimes even reported
>memory allocation error.
>

It sounds like you may need to increase the size of the MCL partition.
Unlike many systems, which dynamically allocate system memory when an application
requires it, the Macintosh allocates a fixed amount of memory for an application
when it starts up. (In System 7, it's possible to ask for more [MultiFinder temporary
memory], but MCL does not use that feature.) This amount, which I call the
"partition size", can be changed in the Finder.

Select the MCL application (or your application created from MCL by SAVE-APPLICATION)
in the Finder, choosing "Get Info" from the "File" menu, and changing the "Current size"
to something larger than MCL's default 3072K. Experiment until you find a size that
balances GC frequency with use of your 20 megs of memory.

(Note: you must quit from MCL before you can change the partition size with the Finder).

>  We have ordered the latest copy of MCL2, but it has not arrived yet.
>I wonder with the problem I described above, if there is an easy solution.
>Or there are something that I have not done properly with the installation.

MCL 2.0b1 is the latest shipping version. We should be shipping MCL 2.0 later
this summer.