>- From my understanding, the scheduler is supposed to lower (or raise,
>depending on your point of view :->) the priority of non-interactive
>processes, processes that consume loads of CPU seconds that is. So I
>assumed that delivering the CTRL-C wouldn't be a big deal.

The short answer is that this isn't a CPU scheduling issue, this is a
memory management issue.  Process priority is not considered when the
system decides what page is headed out to the swap disk, all processes
compete freely for the available RAM, there is no notion of a per process
maximum in terms of physical memory.  It has been this way since the 1st
bsd unix vm systems.

						--Greg