RHEL 4 improvement in use of swap? (compared to RHEL 3)

["robert infotility com" <robert infotility com>]

Hello,

First of all I've used Redhat distributions for several years and
Linux has been almost entirely a pleasant and productive environment
for me. Thanks to all responsible parties for the hard work which
goes into every release.

My question is, is RHEL 4 known to be better at handling
virtual memory (swapping in particular) than RHEL 3 ?

I have an ageing Dell box (2 x 450 MHz cpu, 256 M memory) running
RHEL 3 update 6 (last updated circa 2005/10/01).
Today it was running several Java programs, Mozilla, and various
daemons, and perking along OK. The Java programs are terrible
memory pigs but GUI apps response to mouse clicks and command line
response to keyboard input was OK.

Then I tried recompiling something and the box starts swapping
ceaselessly. After about 15 minutes I hit the reset switch.

I saw the same behavior (everything apparently OK for a long
time, then something pushes it over the edge) a few times several
months ago, and also similar behavior in previous versions of
RHEL a few years ago.

Updates which I downloaded back in February seemed to help.
However now that it's happened again, I guess it's not fixed.

Any helpful comments you have will be appreciated very much.

Robert Dodier