Why has my swap pager gone nuts?

[Borgmaster]

Hi,

Recently upgraded from 4.7-STABLE to 4.8. System seemed to work fine for a
day or two, until I decided to portupgrade mozilla. Since then I am not
able to compile anything without swap pager running out of swap space and
many processes gets killed.

When I try this, X is disabled but some daemons are running, such as
Samba, ntpd, linux emulation, etc. Top reports ~430Mb free. I have 512Mb
RAM in the machine and 256Mb swap partition. I know that one is supposed
to have twice swap as physical RAM, but is that really necessary on my
single user workstation? 1.5G of total memory is twice the memory I have
in some other servers...

The computer has been working just fine for a year or so, even with tons
of applications loaded under X. I suspect something has happened in the
process of upgrading 4.7->4.8. I've built and installed everything in
single-user mode. Could it be some daemon that eats all the
memory? As I wrote it, I though of a possible source, the linux stuff that
loads with linux emulation and vmware. Are they known to be a problem
when upgrading kernel and userland?

Any tips appreciated.

Best regards,
Rickard Borgmäster