> There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not > be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can > use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out > yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related > to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only > 100 M were being used.
Yeah so it wont be swap related. This sounds more like the desktop responsiveness issue discussed a while back. It might be worth googling that (main issue was fixed in later kernels) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_2637_video&num=1 There's other things that may help, ie CONFIG_HZ_1000=y CONFIG_HZ=1000
