vmstat results attached. I got it to perform pretty badly under vanilla
2.4.6-pre2 but it never completely hung up as it did this morning, perhaps
it was not busy enough.  I did two runs with vanilla 2.4.6-pre2, the first
run is after boot up. Then I did a swapoff/swapon to clear out swap and ran
a make -j8 in the kernel tree again.

The third file is Rik's patch after boot while making the kernel again.
Rik's did get a little "bursty" but nowhere near as bad as the stock kernel.
The compile went great under Rik's patch. Note I continued running vmstat
while doing a swapoff/swapon after Rik's run.  I might have misannotated the
files and placed that remark in vmstat-out.2 rather than .3

In any case, it was with Rik's kernel and it took about 3-2/3 minutes to do
a swapoff after running the compile.