Restricting a programs physical memory use

[Duane Voth]

With the installation of SunOS 4.x on our systems I've seen physical
memory usage become much more efficient... except in one case.

I have many processes running, an X server and a dozen or two client
programs, and the screen is cluttered with many windows and objects of
different types.  Every thing runs harmoniously until I start the Lisp
interpreter.  This hog which typically has a virtual image size of 14Mb
causes window "performance" to become nearly worthless.  I have 16Mb
physical memory in my diskless client and figure that with paging only
part of that nasty Lisp program needs to be around at a given time.  But
what I see is that massive amounts of paging (pi & po under vmstat) occurs
when I simply move the mouse from the Lisp xterm to another editor xterm.
The X server has, of course, also been paged out and I end up waiting
maybe 15-20 seconds for the server to recognize that the input focus has
moved and perhaps more for the editor to respond to key strokes.

Isn't there some way to restrict the amount of physical memory that the
Lisp process uses so that I only have to be patient with it and not
everything else on my screen?  I've tried "limit memoryuse 2048k" before
starting Lisp with no real improvement.

Or, is there a way to insist that some key programs not be paged out?  A
memory priority switch: mnice maybe?