Originally Posted by directfiesta

as an example of a heavy WP usage on a dual Xeon 3.0 Ghz:

top - 18:36:03 up 42 days, 8:02, 1 user, load average: 0.13, 0.16, 0.24
Tasks: 262 total, 1 running, 261 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 7.0% us, 2.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 89.7% id, 0.9% wa, 0.1% hi, 0.2% si
Mem: 3090296k total, 2716696k used, 373600k free, 82456k buffers
Swap: 4096532k total, 213776k used, 3882756k free, 378908k cached

The mem is practically all used on this box, and it has 3 Gigs of DDR2 ...
So your one gig must be gone in seconds, causing the bottleneck, then freezing of the box.