> I am getting a lot of segmentation faults (can't find page or something
> similar) with almost anything I run at present. stuff running under X is
> usually very flakey- as is the X server, but GCC also suffers when
> building some files - as a result I am finding it difficult to build
> anything.

I often get those when running heavyweight applications that grind the VM,
mostly X stuff. I generally get a 'page translation fault' or somesuch in
the X server and it just bombs out. 

> At present, I got 12 + 1 Mb of memory on my system, and a swap file of
> about 32Mb in anticipation of getting another 32Mb of ram. It is my
> suspision that processes are using just too much virtual memory - its
> hammering my harddisc....

Yeah - I've found this, although really there *should* be no problem as
regards this. True, there will be a lot more page swapping on a low memory
system, but other than speed I wouldn't have expected this to matter...

> Can anyone give advice as to solution to these problems? I will be
> getting the extra memory anyway. Will this clear it up to some extent?

I found it helped a lot. Initially I had just 2x8 meg simms, and 2mb vram
in my RiscBSD computer. However, by swapping round a bit of memory with my
other RiscPC, and giving it 22mb, it seems to have made quite a difference
to general stability. I would imagine getting more would make things
smoother still.

For a while I thought the problems could just be general hardware faults,
but I've tried a *lot* of different processor/simm combinations (2
different strongarm cards, a 610 and 710 card, and memory combinations
ranging from 8 to 24 meg using different combinations of RAM and VRAM
simms) and I always got the problems... 

Anyway - have fun!

Joe
 __
 _|) "My imagination is a wild and untamed thing"  - Steve Hodgson
(_|