> Also, why do the swapper, pagedaemon and reaper use so much memory (as
   > reported by ps)?  They have an rss of 5.5 Mb on my 386 and 18Mb on my PII
   > (160 Mb RAM).  Is this really accurate?  If there is really 5.5 Mb
   > allocated to the system processes, there shoudln't be anything left.


this value is shared amount all kernel processes (at least, all those
using proc0's address space).  it also might include the buffer cache...


and it might be wrong  :-(   i think they i386 port was fixed but other
ports have it wrong at times... (only for kernel processes AFAIK)