pathalias slowdown

[Ronald Florence]

We use pathalias (9.1 87/10/04) with Xenix 2.3.2, on a ps2/80 with six
megabytes of ram.  Building our map normally takes ~2 minutes.

The recent batch of maps apparently has taken our pathalias over some
threshold.  Without the map u.usa.ca.1, the build takes the same ~2
minutes.  With all of the maps included on the command line, pathalias
churns and swaps, slowly growing in size.  An hour later, when I
finally killed the process, it was at 5704K (according to ps); the
machine was swapping furiously (the vmstat display made you want to
cry); and the last message from the "-v" option in pathalias was
still "***mapping".

I assume we need more memory.  Why does the memory need grow so
ferociously with what seems an incremental addition of nodes and
links?  Is there a fix short of another two megabytes of ram?

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions.
--

Ronald Florence			{yale,uunet}!hsi!mlfarm!ron