[lug] CVS going crazzy?

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

Hello, just a quick question:

One of my servers recently came to a crushing halt
without any obvious reasons. After rebooting the
log ashowed some suspicious kernel messages about running
out of memory which sounded rather strange considering the
amount of RAM the box has. While i was doing a CVS checkout
from the box just now i got a panic telephone call from one
of my co-workers who happened to be logged into the server
and who observed CVS eating up memory like hell. I killed
the process (just in time, the box was getting slugish 
pretty fast) and set up some decent ulimit for the cvs
server. Now, any cvs operation except a comit will blow
up the process within seconds. 
Has anyone experienced similar behaviour? 
Some details:

Kernel version: 2.2.17
VS version:     1.10.8 (client/server)
Dsitribution:   Debian 2.2 (practically a fresh install from
                the official CD images).

glibc:           2.2-6 (from Debian package libc6)	


 Ralf