Insane memory usage.

[swagr]

I've been having problems with random memory usage spikes. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it really sucks.

Kernel 2.4.19-r1

As an example of the sort of problems I've been experienced:
1. Boot into console.
2. Log in.
3. less a 700k file.
4. All of a sudden heavy swapping occurs, I can barely start top on another console to find out that 380M ram are full and 200M of swap are used. System memory usage is at 80%.

Or:
1. In X, memory usage at 40-50 megs.
2. Start designer (Qt designer), memroy is at 50-60 megs.
...
3. All of a sudden heavy swapping occurs, I can barely start top to find out that 380M ram are full and 200M of swap are used. System memory usage is at 80%.

Any ideas?

I have 384M of ram and 450M of swap.
And I don't have any cron jobs or anything set up that would suddenly use resources without me knowing.

[AutoBot]

Well if you can't visually see an application doing this, then perhaps it is the kernel or more than likely a bad driver.

Try emerging the newer gentoo-sources and building it, if that doesn't work or if you don't want to do that try booting using only the essential drivers and perhaps the problem will not show, therefore at least narrowing it down to a faulty driver.
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