My ix86 box has 64MB memory and 80MB swap. While working under X, I was writing a longer comment in a form in Netscape (Navigator) 4.61, while I noticed that sometimes the computer needed a second before my typed chars appeared on the screen. Once every few (10..20) lines. Then everything stopped working, my hd went crazy and Linux was swapping endlessly. I saw xosview showing me that all of the memory and swap was in use. I managed to switch back to a console, and "top" showed me that only two processes really used memory: X11 and ld-linux.so.2 (Sorted by memory use 'M'): PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 786 tevessen 8 0 58908 33M 160 D 32M 1.7 54.0 12:43 ld-linux.so.2 680 root 3 0 32328 16M 36 D 0 0.0 26.8 33:20 X 698 tevessen 0 0 2824 1556 0 S 0 0.0 2.4 2:48 enlightenment I quit "top", first killed two running "joe"s to get a few MB space, then did a "kill" on ld-linux.so.2; that didn't work, so I "kill -9"d it, and memory usage went back to standard values after a while. Only Netscape had crashed in the meantime. I switched back to X11 to write this comment using a freshly started Netscape, and here is a dump of what my memory usage usually is: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 63124 61704 1420 27700 1316 21360 -/+ buffers/cache: 39028 24096 Swap: 82620 47908 34712 (note that many applications are still swapped out at the moment.) This is a RH60 that has been updated to RH61, so glibc-2.1.2-11.i386 is in use.
Grab the errata netscape packages; they don't run netscape against the compatibility libs, so you'll just have normal netscape crashes. :)