Just to add another data point to this thread... I disabled the swap
spaces on my 16MB VS3100/M76 to see if I could avoid the hangs.  I was in
the process of compiling some things and the compilation of one of the C
files caused my system to hang.  (a2ps-4.12/lib/metaseq.c of the a2ps
package from the pkgsrc tarball dated 25 Jun 1999).

Trying this without the swap spaces, I ran out of memory pretty quickly.  
UVM reported killing off the memory agressive cc1 process, but my machine
hung at the same time.  I'd assume that the UVM should kill the process
and then continue, so it looks like there's a bug somewhere in there.

-brian.
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Brian "JARAI" Chase | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ | VAXZilla LIVES!!!