heavy swapping may kill system?

[Justin C. Sherrill]

I had a DragonFly 1.8.2 system lock up on me completely - even the console
was frozen.  All that was printed was a long series of this:

swap_pager_getswapspace: failed

I hit the power button and rebooted, but I've noticed an ongoing series of
this: (from dmesg)

> pid 788 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
> pid 806 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
> pid 815 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
> pid 825 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
(repeat...)

Investigating, one of the user accounts has some multi-gigabyte backup
files in ~, and imap-uw is trying to index them as mail messages.  The
error here lies either in my configuration or imap-uw, but: it appears to
have locked up the system after a while.  Should that runaway application
have been able to bring down the entire computer that way?