> The thing is, just because some swap space is used, that doesn't mean > that the pages aren't also in physical RAM. Linux is actually very good > about keeping things efficient, and you certainly don't need to reboot > to continue working.
Things were getting really slow because the harddrive was obviously spending all the time in swap. So it was faster to reboot. Maybe in that particular case when it was worst the memory was all eaten by a badly behaving app. I'll look at top next time to find out for sure.
