I think I'm the only one with that problem... and I can't figure out what's wrong :(
How's your swapfile size? Maybe your system doesn't do overcommits, thus there must be enough physical ram + swapfile for all virtual allocations. That'd be the only thing that I could think of, although whether overcommits can be disabled and so on I don't know. So I might be just rambling insanely ;-)
overcommitting is default and I knew that there was a way top turn it off, so a find /proc -name "*commit*" found:
/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
Oh wait, it seems it's not default:
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory 0
Nevertheless I acknowledge that a compounding issue is VM fragmentation of a process. Redoing the prelink & friends would be one way to attack that.
Another issue is how safe it really is to allow overcommits. They are off on my FC4 system too.
Cheers, Kuba