Lisp anyone?

[AnimalMachine]

I've been working on a new website framework written in lisp and using SBCL (with hunchentoot, cl-who, clsql, etc.) ... only to find out that there appears to be problems running lisp implementations on vps's.

Has anyone else tried this and found a working lisp?

[jasonaward]

I know of problems with LISP running on Xen, but I haven't heard this about OpenVZ. Have you actually tested this? What kind of problem are you having?

[AnimalMachine]

Well, just trying to apt-get install sbcl on debian will give me a memory allocation error:

Recompiling Common Lisp Controller for sbcl
/usr/lib/common-lisp/bin/sbcl.sh loading and dumping clc.
mmap: Cannot allocate memory
ensure_space: failed to validate 536870912 bytes at 0x09000000

I believe I tried to install from a binary tarball which failed in a similar fashion. Cmucl also failed in the same way.

[jasonaward]

Are you sure you're just not running out of memory?

[AnimalMachine]

Well, I can't imagine that sbcl would require 512Mb. I do only have a link3 (256mb) and it does run a few other things, but I have seen people running into similar things based on my google searches. My ulimit is wide open, execpt for ports, pipes, and stacks.

*shrug*

For the time being, I'm switching back to my scheme code base.

[gnurag]

heh, i too had to give up plans of putting up hunchentoot driven website on my link3 due to lack of memory. I however use another community supported Xen server and hunchentoot/sbcl works flawlessly there(ofcourse with 1GB vps ram, it wont complain)

btw, AnimalMachine, did that lisp framework based website get finished? Any demos around :-) ?

[AnimalMachine]

Originally Posted by gnurag

heh, i too had to give up plans of putting up hunchentoot driven website on my link3 due to lack of memory. I however use another community supported Xen server and hunchentoot/sbcl works flawlessly there(ofcourse with 1GB vps ram, it wont complain)

btw, AnimalMachine, did that lisp framework based website get finished? Any demos around :-) ?

It never really got finished. It was working for my blog, but it's unpolished and just cobbled together. Currently, I'm trying to write up a series of posts (on code-poet.org) on building a website with scheme, but I can throw in a quick diversion for hunchentoot if you'd find it helpful.

ht/sbcl/slime was a really nice set of tools to work with. Right now, with chicken scheme, the REPL gets locked by blocking socket operations I believe. And while I think there's a hackish way to get around it, the blocked REPL is kind of symbolic of how rough the edges are of the scheme tools compared to the ht/sbcl/slime set.

[AnimalMachine]

Well I've finally had a closer look to this and solved the simple problem. I figured I should update this thread with the fix.

sbcl --dynamic-space-size 64

Using that command line, I'm able to at least get to the REPL. It's not like sbcl has a wide array of command line options, so I'm suprised this one escaped me.

Edit: Also note that since sbcl failed to install via apt-get on debian, I just installed sbcl 1.0.7 from the linux binary tarball.