swapper running forever -- anybody know why?

[rcj at burl.UUCP]

We are running USG 5.0 on a Vax 11/780 with 4Mbytes of memory.
Our system is taken down automatically for backup at 5:00 am
every morning and brought back to multi-user at ~5:50 am.  Here
are the first three lines from a 'ps -ef' taken at 2:45 pm:

    UID   PID  PPID  C   STIME   TTY  TIME COMMAND
   root     0     0  0  Sep 27     ? 2140:46 swapper
   root     1     0  0  Sep 27     ? 34:29 /etc/init
   root     0     0  0  Sep 27     ?  0:00 swapper

We average about 20 users at any given time in the day -- never over
25 users.  Most of them are using emacs or doing very small stuff --
the only hogs that are running are vc (a visual calculator), nroff,
and a fair amount of uucp activity.  Not NEARLY enough to justify
any swapping at *ALL*, much less what I seem to see above.

What am I missing, or what might be the cause of this and how
can I remedy it?  Please reply via mail to keep net.unix-wizards 
congestion to a minimum.

Thanks for your time,
-- 

The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3814 (Cornet 291)
alias: Curtis Jackson	...![ floyd clyde ihnp4 mhuxv ]!burl!rcj