Here's what I found on a couple of my systems...
with about 100 MB swap, 256 MB RAM

Slack 8
running KDE

opening konq browsers

it uses RAM until it gets low then starts
using swap until it's out of memory, if you continue to open more it will get to a point that X will exit out to the terminal. Then the memory is back to normal. You can then restart X.

Redhat 7.2

Uses RAM until the used RAM and Cached Ram get a little low then it starts using about double the used Ram in swap
until it is all gone. It seems to lessen the amount of caching as it gets full.

It does not exit out of X though. X becomes very slow and networking continues to work. Trying to open more stuff will just stall and not open it seems.

The easy way out that I could see was to go out to another terminal and kill some browsers and kdeinits to bring it back in normal range
It was not necessary to reboot either system.


Then I tried RedHat 7.2 with no swap.

It was about the same except it finally exited out of X after filling up the RAM.


but it was faster up until the ram was full.

It still did not crash the kernel and I was able to restart x again.