3130 Problems

[Vincent M. Del Vecchio]

Sorry to bother all of you 4D-type people, but...
We have been having problems with a few 3130s that we have at a high
school.  I have net access (through this account) and have been porting
a variety of software to the machines.  Unfortunately, I have been able
to crash the machine fairly easily.  If I run any program which is too
large, it seems, the machine hangs.  It has happened to me compiling,
with a compression program called "sqz", and is most easily demonstrated
with emacs, by simply looking at a large file (several megs), which will
work file, and then deleting a line, for example.  The machine will go
into a dead state.  It will respond to pings and the terminal drivers
will still work (you can watch control characters echo), but it is dead.
 It is also worth noting that editing the same file which causes the
crash on either of two 4 meg machines works on an 8 meg, but larger
files will also cause the 8 meg to crash.  It is possible that we
haven't noticed these problems before because we didn't run anything
large enough; the only other possibility is the shell that I ported
(tcsh, using BSD4.4 sources to csh).  I had to make some strange
modifications to the signal handling code to get it to work.  I believe
we are running OS version 3.6.

Does anyone know what this is, or, more importantly, how to stop it from
happening?

Thanks for any info.

-Vincent Del Vecchio
(vd09 at andrew.cmu.edu)