wojtek@wojtek.from.pl writes:

>what i've done wrong? i've used linux on 8MB and was much faster and
>almost no swapping compared to netbsd.

but certainly not with an egcs-based gcc, I would bet.
My experience is, that netbsd consistently uses less memory than gnu/linux,
due in some parts to the much smaller memory footprint of the BSD C library,
sh vs. bash and generally less bloat.
Note however, that compiling with the egcs-based gcc as shipped with
netbsd 1.5 (and newer gnu/linux distributions, of course) is almost
impossible on a 8 meg system, because the C compiler alone eats happily
around 4 megs when compiling, more when higher optimization levels and
more complicated source code are involved (which is not an unusual and
bad thing per se, most modern compilers trade memory consumption for
code analyzation and generated code quality aswell as compiler speed,
though the latter seems not to be the case with egcs, which is a horribly
slow pig.)

mkb