Running out of swap space in V/AT

[David L. Smith]

My newsfeed began sending me compressed news a few weeks ago and since then
I have been running into a problem fairly regularly.  The uncompress eats
up a large amount of memory, and if I happend to have something else that
is a memory hog (like vnews with a vi sub-process) I run out of swap space
and the system starts complaining.  However, instead of doing something
sensible, like killing a process or two, it seems to get hung up in a
perpetual swap state.  Only my super-user shell works, everything else
is hung up.  Trying to kill -9 some of the offensive processes leaves
me with zombies that won't go away, and a system that still won't do anything.
The only way to get the system to work again is to reboot.

Has anyone else run into this problem?  Any fixes for this besides making
a larger swap partition?


-- 
David L. Smith
{sdcsvax!jack,ihnp4!jack, hp-sdd!crash, pyramid, uport}!sdeggo!dave
sdeggo!dave at amos.ling.edu 
Sinners can repent but stupid is forever.