James Wetterau writes:
> "Perry E. Metzger" says (original message order scrambled):
> > Meanwhile, I suspect after your perl script croaks and the system has
> > had a while to digest, your machine may recover on its own.
> 
> As it turned out I gave it a little over 24 hours and neither ssh
> login nor the console responded.  The machine was locked up tight.
> Interestingly, (to me anyway) NAT continued to work just fine, and
> the response time for pings remained reasonable.

That should not be surprising. ping and NAT are handled in the kernel, 
as is routing. What has died is your userland.

You might want to check that you have enough swap space configured,
btw. See swapctl(8). If you don't, that could be causing some of your
trouble.

BTW, no unix behaves entirely gracefully when it exhausts all
available memory. You have only so much VM, and if you use every drop, 
well...

> > setting your
> > ulimit to prevent the user dataset size from growing too large, or
> > upgrading to a UVM enabled version of -current, or even both, might be 
> > a good idea.
> 
> Speaking of ulimits, man ulimit turns up nothing and it's not in my
> path.  Where is it?

Check the man page for your shell. ulimit is a shell builtin.

Perry