Is anyone else seeing this?

yes.  i see something similar often.  indeed, the other day i
was trying to get a debugging versino of libxview built.  this
is a very large library with debugging and the stupid way that
it builds the .a file it ran an ar for a large number of times
eventually, i could not account for 30meg of swap (i was running
with about 84 meg swap, 16 meg ram, and 75mg swap in use, before
i rebooted).

.mrg.