I agree with the other posters, this feels like a paging allocation
problem.

This may be a prime time to convince the powers that be, that it is
time to
upgrade the OS.

AIX5.1 and above is much more graceful about what it kills when there
is
a paging space constraint problem.

I wouldn't say that it is perfect...But I have seen a box lose most of
it's
functionality with overallocation of paging space recover itself in an
hour or so.
I have never seen 4.3.3 recover that way.

By that time you will most likely need to restart your applications, or
reboot
the server, but at least you have no mystery of what had happened.

If you are not sure that paging space allocation is causing a problem,
then
you should try and capture a dump, instead of rebooting.

Though, then you will need to find someone who can read the dump....


Casey