Disappearing debug

["Len Zaifman UoGuelph 824-4120 xt 6566", 519]

     Our operations group was running a backup recently, which crashed.
The system was brought up again and much to my dismay(at a later date), there
was no /debug file system(using df to show what was there). The processes
seemed to be running normally, and using the command from /etc/init.d
to mountfsys the /debug, it appeared. Can someone explain what was going on?
In particular, how can processes run without swap space?? Are they all kept
in memory?? What would have happened if we ran out of physical memory and
had to swap ??

     Thanks for any help in this matter.

                                            Regards
                                            Len Zaifman