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GC garbage collector

Macaulay2 uses the excellent garbage collector GC, version 8.0.6, written by Hans-J. Boehm and Alan J. Demers and generously licensed to the public. It is available at https://www.hboehm.info/gc/.

Some environment variables can be set by the user to tune garbage collector performance:

The full list is found in the source code for gc in the file doc/README.environment.

Here are some error messages you may see from it when it aborts the program, due to lack of memory or related problems.

You may simply be out of memory, and then the only recourse is to increase the memory available to the program. However, if you don't have enough heap sections, sometimes one can just start Macaulay2 by setting the GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE environment variable to some larger value with an environment setting prefix on the M2 command line, e.g., GC_INITIAL_HEAP_SIZE=20G M2.

See also