Comment 2 for bug 386554

It would be interesting to see what top and other stats report. 44M is only 3% of memory in this case and looking at firefox on my x86_64, it has a vm of 950M and a res set of 434M. It could be hitting the point where it is invalidating text pages only to have them be paged back in, basic VM thrashing. Having no swap means that anon pages have nowhere to go so they stay in the page cache whereas they would "normally" get LRU'd to swap to relieve pressure. w/out swap, the machine is a bit "unbalanced". 3% is getting close to the triggers. This is just a guess. We would have to see what the disk traffic was and a few other vm #s were to have a better understanding. One clue would be a predominance of reads. If the traffic could be broken out between /, /usr, /var, and /home we could also get some understanding *what* the reads were about.