Awhile ago I tried compiling WINE, and got the curious error message "virtual
memory exhausted"  I thought this meant I was out of swap, seeing as I had
about 4 netscapes Xemacs and a host of other memory killers loaded.  I killed
them all, no effect, quit X.. no effect.. Finally ran the compile in the
background.. watched the /tmp dir, and the swap.. both had plenty of room..
vmstat seemed happy too.  

Just a few nights ago i got this while building KDE:
Making all in kioslave
c++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/qt/include
-I/usr/X11R6/include  -O2 -Wall -c kfmgui.cpp
In file included from kfmgui.cpp:26:
kfmprops.h:292: virtual memory exhausted
*** Error code 1

If I am running out of something.. how do I prevent that?

---
Tim Rightnour    -  root@garbled.futureone.com
http://www.zynetwc.com/~garbled/garbled.html