[racket] Limit command-line Racket's memory

Hi Matthew, everybody,

On 2011-06-09 7:35 PM, Matthew Flatt wrote:
> Racket normally relies on memory limits imposed by the OS.

After I posted my message, I thought to try ulimit. Unfortunately, it 
didn't help: I couldn't find any setting smaller than all of available 
RAM within which Racket would even get as far as it was getting with no 
limit before crashing with an out-of-memory error.

> With 3m enabled, then custodian-based limits can also constrain
> memory use.

These look possibly-interesting, but they mightn't help much in this 
particular case: they seem more aimed at punishing excessive consumption 
of a shared resource rather than doing more with less? Perhaps once I 
have another try at getting 3m working on MIPS I will be able to report 
back on this.

> Finally, the GC can be tuned in various ways to reduce Racket's
> footprint.

Ah! Boehm or 3m?

For now, I'm making progress by (eww) adding 128M of swap to the system 
via a USB stick (!).

> In this case, it sounds like we should start by making 3m work. I
> imagine you're using a Linux-based system, so it should be easy. Let's
> take that off-list and then resume here.

Yep, sounds good.

Regards,
   Tony