Where or where has my memory gone? (UNIX pc)

[Lenny Tropiano]

Well my machine was up for 30 days, 20 hours, 14 minutes and it just 
flipped out! Things were running slowly.  Does memory get fragmented 
like disks do? Should you reboot frequently, and what is the frequency?   
I was running a news unbatch (compress running...). 
I was in elm, and I have a few drivers loaded (just a few) :-)

 DEVNAME  ID  BLK CHAR  LINE   SIZE    ADDR     FLAGS
    wind   0   -1    7   -1  0x9000   0x54000 ALLOC BOUND 
    lipc   1   -1   -1   -1  0x7000  0x360000 ALLOC BOUND 
     cmb   2   -1   -1   -1  0x3000   0x5d000 ALLOC BOUND 
   voice   3   -1    9   -1  0xa000  0x367000 ALLOC BOUND 
      tp   4   -1   10   -1  0x3000  0x371000 ALLOC BOUND 
 starlan   5   -1   12   -1 0x14000  0x3de000 ALLOC BOUND 

Then of course I have the typical StarLAN daemons running.  My daemons,
and whatever else (probably an uucico & vi).  Am I just asking for too much
out of the machine for 3.5MB.  I know this has been discussed before,
shouldn't the processes just swap out to disk, if there isn't enough
memory?  I do have the standard 5MB swap partition.  The last dying word
of my machine was:

sysinfo: cannot read /dev/rfp002 

(NOTE: there are not HDERR's in unix.log)  The machine was very quiet,
sounded like the news unbatching halted.  The LEDs were normal.  The
mouse responded and tried to select windows.  Then I got a prompt back:

[654 Filecabinet] ps -ef
Killed
[655 Filecabinet] ps -ef
Killed

Would an extra .5MB help?  I'm going to do the 4MB upgrade (1.5MB on
the combo card, a hardware patched 512K card, and 2MB on the 
motherboard).  

Should I decrease the available memory to compress (USERMEM) and 
recompile?  What major effects will this have on compressing (time wise)?

-Lenny
-- 
| Lenny Tropiano            ICUS Software Systems      [w] +1 (516) 589-7930 |
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