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This is not so much a Lisp problem as an SBCL problem. SBCL just doesn't have a very good garbage collector. I nearly gave up on Lisp fighting with it, but ultimately switched to Clozure instead, and never regretted it: Clozure has a fantastic garbage collector. I run Clozure and Postgres side by side on one 4G Linode without a peep.

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I thought you misspelled Clojure initially (I guess it does also benefit from decent gc). I didn't know about Clozure but will investigate when I next use CL.

Also referred to as CCL. It's a good implementation. The compiler doesn't generate as efficient code as SBCL does, and AFAIK doesn't do as much type inference as SBCL, but you get much faster compilation, and the generated code is still quite performant - I used CCL for hobby-level gamedev ~6 years ago, back when CCL was the only implementation that would run on Windows reliably and fast enough for games. These days, SBCL works on Windows too, so that's what I use most of the time - but then, CCL becomes helpful on Raspberry Pi to use all CPU cores, as SBCL (AFAIK, as of 1-2 years ago) still doesn't do proper threading on ARM.

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