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Something seems to fail whenever I push the swap partition to the limit (or at least close to it). From that point on, launching applications such as xterm, xfig, xdvi and emacs (but NOT 'emacs -nw') gets me a bus error and core dump. Netscape also fails with bus error but no core dump. Not all applications launching windows fail though; xv, gimp, ee, xosview, gnome-help-browser, seem to be unaffected. Shutting down and restarting the X server (by going down to run level 1) does not fix the problem, but reboot does fix it. If nothing is done, eventually (some hours later), the problem goes away. The problem appears with gdm and xdm as the display manager. I'm running RH6.0, kernel-2.2.5-22, XFree86-3.3.3.1-52, XFree86-SVGA-3.3.3.1-52. Hardware: Intel MMX 166 MHz. 64MB RAM. 120MB swap partition.
You are running into an out of memory condition, and when you are out of memory, unpredictible things happen (i.e. clients will crash unexpectedly). Solution: increase swap space of keep less programs resident in memory.
Okay, but this condition seems to leave a lot of room for mischief. Seems that ideally, afer some programs have been closed, the condition should disappear instead of linger.