> derick Bruckman writes:
> >Have you tried boosting "execmin"? With the default of "5", switching
> >virtual desktops causes all my background X programs to swap out, but
> >"10", no problem. While compiling, there may be a visible redraw
> >delay, but no swapping. I'm running X, NFS server, name server, time
> >server, ipfilter, lpd, and a netatalk server.
> 
> It's set to 10.  I am not experiencing any swapping at all; this is just
> sluggishness, and I've seen it with as much as 290MB of free memory.
> 

I know this has been mentioned already, but have you tried increasing your
kern.maxvnodes with sysctl?  I was experiencing similar issues on this Dell I8K
(5400 RPM IDE drive, 512 MB RAM) with the default maxvnodes of 17191.  I first
doubled it to 34382 and that seemed to help.  I'm now experimenting again with
68764 and it does seem even better now.  Doing a cvs update with multiple
phoenix windows open, browsing and switching between windows is performing
quite well.

From what I see in the system tuning guide
<http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/tune/5.html> it recommends a setting of
maxvnodes somewhere between 1/6 to 1/4 the amount of RAM.  Since this machine
has 512 MB it seems that I could try going even higher.  I'll keep
experimenting :)

Just to mention it, softdeps are also enabled.

Matt