X dies - out of swap space

[David Banning]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 05:22:20PM -0700, Nathan Kinkade wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 02:11:37PM -0400, David Banning wrote:
> > Apr 10 13:41:39 skytrackercanada /kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
> > Apr 10 13:42:29 skytrackercanada last message repeated 79 times
> > Apr 10 13:42:29 skytrackercanada last message repeated 16 times
> > Apr 10 13:42:29 skytrackercanada /kernel: pid 355 (XFree86), uid 0, was killed:
> >  out of swap space
> > 
> > All of a sudden, every few days, under no great load, X dies and I lose
> > my keyboard. The rest of the machine runs fine. It is still serving 
> > web pages and I can telnet in, but I cannot control the console.
> > A "ps ax" shows that indeed X is not running.
> > 
> > I have searched the list for previous answers but I would like to find
> > out why it is happening.
> > 
> > The best suggestion I heard was to set datasize to 128M in
> > .initrc or .xsession. BTW, where is the man page for those files?
> > 
> > Any suggestion or info on the above subject would be helpful.
> 
> How much memory does this machine have?  How much swap space?  It seems
> that a reasonable amount of memory and a suitable sized swap partition
> should be enough.  I have had this problem before, but on a diskless
> terminal with only 32MB memory and no swap.  I got rid of the problem by
> simply removing unneeded modules from X, however, this shouldn't really
> be necessary if you are using a disk and some swap.

Sorry about the lack of information. Here is the header of top;

CPU states:  0.4% user,  0.0% nice,  0.4% system,  0.4% interrupt, 98.8% idle
Mem: 56M Active, 101M Inact, 32M Wired, 11M Cache, 35M Buf, 48M Free
Swap: 100M Total, 3580K Used, 96M Free, 3% Inuse

Forgive me if I do not provide enough info. I am completely ingnorant
of memory, so I am just cutting my teeth here.  Where are modules loaded
in X? How do you remove them?