I'm going to try and do some more testing, but I really can't see many other explanations. I noticed that just booting NetBSD up on the 4000/90 grabbed more than 16M before the boot was complete, so with only 16M it is going to be paging a lot.
NetBSD 6 runs OK on a VAXstation 4000/30 with 24 megs. Not great, but OK. http://vax.zia.io/The hardware isn't as cool as an 11/785, but it's a bit more affordable to run :)
Well, get to it, man! ;) I expect there will eventually be a fork of NetBSD that will trim the fat and make it more usable. Testing on older, slower hardware would go a long way toward "keeping it honest".Question is if anyone have the time, energy and money for that to happen?
It'd be nice to see pcc for VAX instead of gcc. gcc has way too much fat and take way too long to do anything. And I wonder how much better an entirely crunchgen'd NetBSD would be on a very low memory machine...
John