To run the full LispWorks system, with its GUI, you will need around 30MB of swap space for the image and whatever else is necessary to accommodate your application.
We recommend that you routinely check the size of your image using
cl:room
, whether you see warning messages or not.
When running a large image, you may occasionally see
<**> Failed to enlarge memory
printed to the standard output.
The message means that the LispWorks image is close to the limit: it attempted to expand one of the GC generations, but there was not enough swap space to accommodate the resulting growth in image size. When this happens, the garbage collector is invoked. It will usually manage to free the required space, but if it cannot then crashes may result. Therefore you should take action to reduce allocation or increase available memory when you see this message.
Check the size of the image, both by
cl:room
and by OS facilities (such as
ps
or
top
on *nix, Task Manager on Windows) to see if all the sizes are as expected. If there are large discrepencies, check them.
Occasionally, however, continued demand for additional memory will end up exhausting resources. You will then see the message above repeatedly, and there will be little or no other activity apparent in the image. At this point you should restart the image, or increase swap space. In cases where external libraries are mapped above LispWorks and inhibit its growth, you may be able to relocate LispWorks, as described under "Startup relocation" in the LispWorks User Guide and Reference Manual .
LispWorks Release Notes and Installation Guide - 23 Dec 2011