I realize that PTHREAD_CONCURRENCY>1 isn't recommended for general
consumption as yet, but I decided to give it a go with firefox
(native build on i386) on an oldish dual P-III box with 128 MB RAM
(long story, but the magic blue smoke escaped from my half-decent
workstation).

After a bit of use, a couple of coredumps from firefox (appears
normal, no matter what concurrency), and one hang requiring
"kill -9", I found the poor thing thrashing badly,
and went looking where the RAM had gone, and discovered:

ksh$ vmstat -m | egrep '^[A-Z]|^saup'
vmstat: Kmem statistics are not being gathered by the kernel.
Memory resource pool statistics
Name        Size Requests Fail Releases Pgreq Pgrel Npage Hiwat Minpg Maxpg Idle
saupcpl     1612 119234493   0 119198379 18103   44 18059 18061     0   inf    1
In use 64413K, total allocated 83316K; utilization 77.3%

Shutting down all pthread apps didn't improve matters, the only
option was reboot. This is a plain GENERIC.MP from the netbsd-4 branch
about a month back.

Is this a known issue? Anything I can look at here?

Cheers,
--
Paul Ripke
Unix/OpenVMS/TSM/DBA
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams