Maxima Manual
2.3 Garbage Collection
Symbolic computation tends to create a good deal
of garbage, 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.
