Symptom

SBCL-based Maxima runs out of memory.

Suspected diagnosis

The Lisp compiler SBCL by default comes with a memory limit, that allows it to run even on low-end computers. When compiling a big software package like Lapack or dealing with extremely big lists or equations this limit might be too low. In order to extend the limits SBCL can be provided with the command line parameter --dynamic-space-size that tells SBCL how many megabytes it should reserve. A 32-bit Windows-SBCL can reserve up to 999 Megabytes. A 64-bit SBCL version running on Windows can be instructed to use more than the about 1280 Megabytes compiling Lapack needs.

Possible cure

One way to provide Maxima (and thus SBCL) with command line parameters is the Additional parameters for Maxima field of wxMaxima’s configuration dialogue.