Swap ==== Oh, I finally managed our computing server (the old good Sun Ultra 40 with two dual-core Opterons and 12 gb ram) to fill most of its RAM. My FEA solution occupied 9.6 GB of RAM! And it needed to run about 1,5 hours. Then I started two further solutions (at the same time unfortunately). As the RAM was not enough so swap was used... and solutions ran for 18 and 16 hours :-( Well, swapping is slow, very slow.