On a machine that I use distcc to help with compiling, I often use -j15. However, this gets quite hairy when building pygtk with USE=doc, as 15 xsltproc processes or the like eats a LOT of resources and make the machine come to its knees. Is it possible to limit the documentation generation to a single thread? I realize this limits people who are using sane values like -j3, another option would be to cap it at a sane value like 3 (totally arbitrary... feel free to close this if it's ridiculous). Reproducible: Always
Have you tried setting MAKEOPTS="-j15 -l<arbitrary number>" to limit the load?
This might help: $ cat /etc/portage/env/dev-python/pygtk MAKEOPTS="-j1" Generally MAKEOPTS should reflect both the number of processors and the memory each subprocess will use. So let's say you have eight cores and only 3 GB memory, then having large C++ programs being preprocessed (with each cc1plus using more than half a gigabyte of RAM) could get the build killed. You'll have to find a balance or install more RAM. It's certainly not something that should be fixed in pygtk alone.
