On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Miguel Medalha <miguelmedalha at sapo.pt>wrote: > > Nevertheless, it seems to me that you should have more than 3GB of RAM on > a 64 bit system... > Since the width of the binary word is 64 bit in this case, 3GB correspond > to 1.5GB on a 32 bit system... > If you have a 64 bit system you should give it space to work properly. > Don't worry, you asked exactly the right question - but, unfortunately, it is not a 32-bit OS here that's the culprit so the situation is more involved than that. You are right - it would indeed be desirable to have more than 3 GB of RAM on that system. However it is not obvious to me that having that little RAM should cause I/O failure? Why? That it would make the machine slow is to be expected - and especially so given that I had to jack the swap up to some 40 GB. But I do not necessarily see why I should have outright failures due solely to not having more RAM. Boris.