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When you use MAKE-PROCESS to create a thread, you can specify a stack size. Clozure CL does not impose a limit on the stack size you choose, but there is some evidence that choosing a stack size larger than the operating system's limit can cause excessive paging activity, at least on some operating systems.
The maximum stack size is operating-system-dependent. You can use shell commands to determine what it is on your platform. In bash, use "ulimit -s -H" to find the limit; in tcsh, use "limit -h s".
This issue does not affect programs that create threads using the default stack size, which you can do either by specifying no value for the :stack-size argument to MAKE-PROCESS, or by specifying the value CCL::*default-control-stack-size*.
If your program creates threads with a specified stack size, and that size is larger than the OS-specified limit, you may want to consider reducing the stack size in order to avoid possible excessive paging activity.
It's not clear that exposing PROCESS-SUSPEND/PROCESS-RESUME is a good idea: it's not clear that they offer ways to win, and it's clear that they offer ways to lose.
It has traditionally been possible to reset and enable a process that's "exhausted" . (As used here, the term "exhausted" means that the process's initial function has run and returned and the underlying native thread has been deallocated.) One of the principal uses of PROCESS-RESET is to "recycle" threads; enabling an exhausted process involves creating a new native thread (and stacks and synchronization objects and ...),and this is the sort of overhead that such a recycling scheme is seeking to avoid. It might be worth trying to tighten things up and declare that it's an error to apply PROCESS-ENABLE to an exhausted thread (and to make PROCESS-ENABLE detect this error.)
When native threads that aren't created by Clozure CL first call into lisp, a "foreign process" is created, and that process is given its own set of initial bindings and set up to look mostly like a process that had been created by MAKE-PROCESS. The life cycle of a foreign process is certainly different from that of a lisp-created one: it doesn't make sense to reset/preset/enable a foreign process, and attempts to perform these operations should be detected and treated as errors.
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