I have a 9600 with Sonnet 800MHz, but I long ago reduced its RAM from 1GB to 512MB, and still have no need to use VM. Designed-in VM management was the cause of my doing so. Older Macs, with the exception only of the true 68000s (Macintosh to Classic), and the Mac II, IIx and IIcx, are typically supposed to deal with up to 1GB of VM, but when installed RAM approaches that limit, problems arise. Assuming that you have only EDO RAM in the 9600 rather than FPM, and certainly not a mixture of the two, you will find if you test the matter that about 940MB of available RAM or less is needed if the system is not to wax hysterical. Permanent isolation of, say, 128MB as a RAM Disk may solve the problem, but it is easier (physically and notionally with 128MB interleaved DIMMs) to reduce RAM to at most 768MB of installed RAM. Remember that 1GB of VM management was introduced with the SE/30, when 128MB seemed like a king's ransom in cost.

I haven't retested the matter since going to OS 9.2.2 from 9.1 on the 9600, so I cannot pretend to know whether that might just solve the problem. However, with OS9Helper, it is easily enough tested.

de

Second occurrence of EDO corrected to FPM.