George Michaelson writes:
> two different things might help:
> 
> 	merged vm/iobuf cache. would remove some dup usage and copying.
> 	probably would see perf gains to match sunos on that platform.
> 
> 	improve minfree behaviour. what to swap when you are close to
> 	thrashing is a good question. surely just tuning the minfree
> 	requirement down to ensure some "core" code (update/init whatever)
> 	is around would help?

Can you expand on this a bit? Is any of this doable by just tuning
things in the kernel configuration, or does it take digging into
/usr/src/sys/vm/*? I'd really like to see this improved, but my last
exposure to vm stuff (other than diddling with page registers on a 386,
which is really a totally different topic) was about 13 years ago in an
undergrad OS course.

> increasing swap markedly might also have helped

We have it configured for 512MB of swap (256MB on each of the two
disks). I can't imagine it ever having a use for more.

> I thought the swap/vm
> thing was kinda related for long-lived processes. your make doesn't
> sound quite the same as people finding a 60mn named has locked up...

It's a different problem. I haven't really been bothered by the swap
leak problem; I guess the long lived processes I have running (no named,
just nfsd, nfsiod, ypbind, gated, sendmail, and the "standard" things
like init et al) don't do as much allocation as named.