when i only had 512 mb of ram this was definitely the case, even with 2x as much swap as
ram, the only way to get out of 'swap hell' was reboot, the system became so
unresponsive. really easy to happen with a memleak, or during compilation or a runaway
script etc..
Sounds like some problems i've had years ago when i started with
unixes and partitioned oddly. Is the swap partition at the end of the
drive? It will take much longer for the disk to seek back and forth if
the application is reading/writing data and swapping at the same time.
Slow as dirt.
If you run bash, you could consider setting RAM/CPU limits for the
audio user (man ulimit) it's handy keep some resources free; enough to
login as root and gun down delinquent processes.
--
steev();