Well, I've found the reason why my machine goes catatonic far a few seconds
now and then.

At some point someone decided to use extent maps to keep track of swap
space.  This might look like a good decision, but it was obviously not tested
for performance.  Here are some typical figures:

amap_wipeout: 4604442 usec, 19233 extent_free calls, 26596209 loops
amap_wipeout: 2065357 usec, 9093 extent_free calls, 11504939 loops
amap_wipeout: 4947341 usec, 19475 extent_free calls, 27719989 loops
amap_wipeout: 1451860 usec, 6012 extent_free calls, 7919861 loops
amap_wipeout: 2856252 usec, 10727 extent_free calls, 14612941 loops
amap_wipeout: 3978208 usec, 12350 extent_free calls, 18281796 loops
amap_wipeout: 1414115 usec, 4196 extent_free calls, 6308825 loops
amap_wipeout: 1934060 usec, 5735 extent_free calls, 8818042 loops
amap_wipeout: 1373972 usec, 3923 extent_free calls, 6141905 loops

The usec is the number of microseconds to complete an amap_wipeout
(which gets frees swap space), extent_free calls is the number of calls
to extent_free(), and loops is the number of iteration through the loop
in extent_free().

25 miilion loops, 5s for a process to exit!?!?!  It's so bad it's not even funny.

Either the extent maps have to be improved, or some other data structure
has to be used.

    -- Lennart