RAM-rust

I seem not to have enough physical memory, since every time I switch virtual desktops it seems to swap for half a minute or more before everything is useable again (although, just to prove me wrong, it's stopped doing it now). This is irritating, as I think 80MB ought to be more than enough. (I bought the machine with 16MB in August 1997 and ran perfectly happily (with my 16-colour X server(!) until Precision Insight released their free-of-charge X server for Neomagic chips) until May 1998 when I added a 64MB module (the maximum available) so I could do such exotic things as pnmrotate on a scanned image. It's all worked very well since then.)

What have I got running on my machine?

         VSZ  RSS
Mozilla  58M  27M
Mozilla  55M  28K
Mozilla  49M  28K
Mozilla  44M  28K
Mozilla  38M  12M
Mozilla  27M  28K
X        25M   6M
X        22M   1M
licq     11M   2M
Xvnc      8M   1M
jpilot    5M   1M
jpilot    5M   1M
vncviewer 4M   1M
innd      4M 528K
vncviewer 4M 280K
xterm     3M 300K to 800K (15 instances)
nxterm    3M   0K (2 instances)
actived   3M   1M
screen    2M   0K
procmeter 2M 452K

plus 32 smaller processes averaging 240K RSS and 72 completely swapped out.

OK, not quite sure why user 509 has four Mozillas running, but as they are swapped out they shouldn't be making any difference. I'll investigate that in a moment. The copy of Mozilla which I'm typing this into has only a 27M RSS, so not quite sure why two Mozillas and an X server shouldn't fit comfortably into 80M. I suspect the trick is to keep the other one iconised except when it's in use, so that I don't accidentally cause it to swap itself in (and everything else out) by switching to its desktop. Mozilla does seem to be excessively resource-hungry, even compared to Netscape 4.