Looking at the free memory/swap sar stats:- 00:00:00 freemem freeswap 23:30:00 1229676 50753852 23:35:00 1230277 50778877 23:40:00 1186372 50040720 23:45:00 840589 44463854 23:50:01 59762 22711761 23:55:01 60871 13228370 00:05:01 63081 6928788 00:10:01 63160 6511357 [...] 04:15:28 35314 4558492 04:26:49 26232 4531772 04:35:17 15879 4625317 So in that period it chewed up all physical RAM and about 27G of swap. In the same period the paging rates go nuts:- 00:00:00 pgout/s ppgout/s pgfree/s pgscan/s %ufs_ipf 23:35:00 0.06 0.07 0.06 0.00 0.00 23:40:00 0.05 0.08 0.08 0.00 0.00 23:45:00 0.06 0.07 0.25 1.39 0.00 23:50:01 327.91 2125.82 3667.46 14256.52 0.00 23:55:01 180.98 1861.13 1914.00 17752.15 0.00 00:05:01 474.28 845.27 847.10 4823.71 0.00 00:10:01 351.71 644.99 649.32 1353.48 0.00 00:15:01 725.20 1229.70 1262.38 6071.81 0.00 [...] 04:15:28 612.09 612.13 1295.89 144160.61 0.00 04:26:49 301.97 301.98 892.26 165320.53 0.00 04:35:17 23.62 23.64 428.92 235926.64 0.00