[ale] swap and netscape

[Wandered Inn]

Had something wierd happen and thought I'd pick the brains of the list. 
I have two machines running Linux as follows:

P200MMX, 128m, kernel 2.2.10, 100 meg swap
p166MMX, 128m, kernel 2.0.36, 100 meg swap

I have a single monitor which is connected to the p200 and I access the
p166 via X, so Netscape is fired up there and running on the P200
display.

I fire up Netscape (4.61) on both machines and load identical png images
(as in file:/foo/bar/img.png 104100 bytes) into both browsers.

When I do this, it appears that most of the impact is in swap, but for
the p166 machine it's taken up 92 meg of the swap, where as on the p200
it's taken 14 meg of swap.

At one point, the p166 machine starting spitting out 'out of memory'
errors when I tried to execute anything. The weird thing is I still have
real memory free and buffer/cache shows some as well.  I would expect
that this memory would be used up before I started getting memory
errors.  If I went to a console, I couldn't log in.  I was able to
cntl-alt-del from a console to reboot, but it took about 15 minutes
before the machine responded.

Is this a consequence of the different kernels?  The fact I'm running
the p166 remote?  I could test this since I can change the
monitor/keyboard/mouse via a switchbox.  I guess I'll give that a shot
and try the same thing.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


--
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at denali.atlnet.com

It should be illegal to yell "Y2K" in a crowded economy.
	-- Larry Wall, creator of the programming language Perl