The good news is that it's not memory OR swap space you're being shown by 'ps'. Instead it's showing you the process ADDRESS space which includes 256 MB of address space reserved for the NIS+ transaction log. Given the cost of moving things around in memory and the fact that we have 4 GB of address space to play with it, this is a good idea. You've just got to stop thinking small. THINK BIG. It's only 1/16th of the total process address space being used. And if you ever exceed the 256 MB size of the transaction log you're doing something VERY wrong.