Kernel swap zone exhausted, what is the max allowed? FBSD 7.2

[Mark Terribile]

Hi,

I was recently forced to reboot a 7.2 machine after it had run for several months.  (Upgrade is not a possibility right now.)  The (apparently) relevant part of /var/log/messages reads

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Feb 23 13:10:58 gold kernel: pid 9864 (to), uid 1001: exited on signal 6 (core dumped)
Feb 23 17:14:13 gold kernel: pid 10386 (epiphany), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Feb 23 17:18:19 gold kernel: pid 10414 (epiphany), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Feb 24 14:56:05 gold kernel: swap zone exhausted, increase kern.maxswzone
Feb 24 14:56:36 gold last message repeated 1933 times
Feb 24 14:56:57 gold last message repeated 1635 times
Feb 24 14:56:57 gold kernel: swap zone exhausted, nncrxase kern.ma swzone
Feb 24 14:56:57 gold kernel: swap zone exhausted, increase kern.maxswzone
Feb 24 14:57:28 gold last message repeated 1017 times
Feb 24 14:59:29 gold last message repeated 2159 times
Feb 24 15:14:03 gold syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
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I don't explicitly set kern.maxswzone anywhere and it is at its apparent maximum and default of 32M (33554432).

Does anyone know if the maximum can be increased?  (What actually is it used for?)  I do use lots of memory-intensive processes, most of them idle much of the time.  I see that it's involved with the stuff in the src/sys/vm directory.  Would someone give me a quick precis or pointer to what I need to study to understand what would happen if I tried to boost this to 64M?

    Mark Terribile