I don't have any additional clues as to the cause, but I can confirm
that I have seen similar problems on a DX2/66 20Meg machine (32Meg swap).
What I've had happen several times now is that just after initiating
a text search inside netscape my machine starts swaping madly
for anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute. After that X hangs completely.
No keyboard response, no mouse response. Nothing. I've left a machine
in this state for up to an hour. Something is still going, because
some scheduled cron jobs ran and registered in the system logs after
the console froze up. I'm guessing that X ran out of memory and
did not die gracefully, but I don't have any evidence to back this up.
Occasionally I'll see the same sort of swaping behavior when running
netscape, followed by a freeze lasting between 30 seconds and 2 minutes,
after which the machine seems to recover itself and procede normally.
This behavior has occured throughout the 2.0.x kernels, and perhaps
earlier, although I can't recall for certain when it started.
Up to now I haven't had enough information to really give a bug report,
but perhaps this information will give someone a clue as to what is happening.
-- eric
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Eric Schenk www: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~schenk
Department of Computer Science email: schenk@cs.toronto.edu
University of Toronto