Comment 544 for bug 595047

I've added some information on the Ubuntu bug page, but will add it here for completeness sake:

1) I'm seeing this problem extremely frequently due to an unrelated bug that makes X leak memory.

2) On a machine with 4GB memory and no swap, the disk starts thrashing like crazy when 60-70% of the memory is used. It's so bad that I can't even log in on a console as getty times out before I get a chance to enter the password.

3) If swap is enabled on the same machine, it will start swapping out. Doing a "swapoff -a" will force the swap in as planned, but it happens with approximately 500KB/s.