Running out of memory for lisp routines

[deheylen690271]

As I have been adding more and more lisp routines to my company's set up, I'm reaching the point where the LISP routines stop working. No bugs, all we have to do is restart AutoCAD and everything works again until we've been in a session too long. I'm pretty sure we are blowing out the memory (32G on Window 10 machines)

I have read that modifying the memory allocations for LISP is not recommended as it affects the string space. If we increase our RAM to 64G will that increase the amount of memory AutoCAD allocates to LISP?

Also, if I re-wrote some routines in VBA (don't have my .NET chops down yet) is that loaded into a separate memory space?

Any help is greatly appreciated

[BIG-AL]

Rather than load them all have you looked at Autoload or as I do in my menu's load on demand.

[aaronic_abacus]

(DEFUN C:READD()
(LOAD "Readd.lsp")
(C:READD)
);END READD

[Tom Beauford]

Like BIG-AL almost all of the lisp I use is loaded on demand from the CUI or set up to autoload. The fact that you are having problems after using a few of them is probably a coding issue. Avoid using global variables at all if possible. Saving large selection sets use up a lot of memory so if you use something like

(setq SS (ssget))

in your code adding

(setq SS nil)

at the end clears it from memory.

[rkmcswain]

As I have been adding more and more lisp routines to my company's set up, I'm reaching the point where the LISP routines stop working. No bugs, all we have to do is restart AutoCAD and everything works again until we've been in a session too long. I'm pretty sure we are blowing out the memory (32G on Window 10 machines)

I have read that modifying the memory allocations for LISP is not recommended as it affects the string space. If we increase our RAM to 64G will that increase the amount of memory AutoCAD allocates to LISP?

Also, if I re-wrote some routines in VBA (don't have my .NET chops down yet) is that loaded into a separate memory space?

Any help is greatly appreciated

Are you sure you don't just have global variables that are stomping on each other? I can't see how even thousands of ASCII lisp files would "blow out the memory" on a modern PC.

[BlackBox]

As I have been adding more and more lisp routines to my company's set up, I'm reaching the point where the LISP routines stop working. No bugs, all we have to do is restart AutoCAD and everything works again until we've been in a session too long. I'm pretty sure we are blowing out the memory (32G on Window 10 machines)

This and that are mutually exclusive.

I've been running 32 GB RAM in Win10x64 Enterprise for 2-3 years now (only recently upgraded to 64 GB) without having experienced a single instance of 'LISP blowing out the memory'... If LISP is your culprit, then you've got one or more LISP routines with global variables that need to be localized, IMHO.

Cheers


[Edit] - RK beat me.

[aaronic_abacus]

how big could an autolisp program be?

[rkmcswain]

how big could an autolisp program be?

No real limit, other than hardware.

You might be familiar with this thread on the topic.

[hugh.69031]

As I have been adding more and more lisp routines to my company's set up, I'm reaching the point where the LISP routines stop working. ...

Could be runaway recursion in a recently added routine. What changed? Have you tried backtracking to a point where loaded routines do not misbehave and then add routines one by one until trouble reappears?

Good luck.

[deheylen690271]

Thanks for the help BlackBox. I do use some globalized variables but only when it's necessary and most routines are auto-loaded. The problem had gotten so bad that I couldn't even make it through acaddoc without routines not getting loaded. I think the problem may have been that I set the Acad, Documents, ActiveDocument, SelectionSets, Blocks, ModelSpace, PaperSpace, Utility, Database, Preferences & Display objects as global variables in acaddoc because I make extensive use of them in other routines. If this was the problem, I don't know why everything worked until a month ago. I (painfully) rewrote all my code to localize these objects and it seems to have improved the situation. At this point, this is going to have be good enough.