Is there a parallel make system that is smart enough to intelligently respond to low-memory/swapping conditions?

I'm a big fan of speeding up my builds using "make -j8" (replacing 8 with whatever my current computer's number of cores is, of course), and compiling N files in parallel is usually very effective at reducing compile times... unless some of the compilation processes are sufficiently memory-intensive that the computer runs out of RAM, in which case all the various compile processes start swapping each other out, and everything slows to a crawl -- thus defeating the purpose of doing a parallel compile in the first place.

Now, the obvious solution to this problem is "buy more RAM" -- but since I'm too cheap to do that, it occurs to me that it ought to be possible to have an implementation of 'make' (or equivalent) that watches the system's available RAM, and when RAM gets down to near zero and the system starts swapping, make would automatically step in and send a SIGSTOP to one or more of the compile processes it had spawned. That would allow the stopped processes to get fully swapped out, so that the other proce开发者_Go百科sses could finish their compile without further swapping; then, when the other processes exit and more RAM becomes available, the 'make' process would send a SIGCONT to the paused processes, allowing them to resume their own processing. That way most swapping would be avoided, and I could safely compile on all cores.

Is anyone aware of a program that implements this logic? Or conversely, is there some good reason why such a program wouldn't/couldn't work?

For GNU Make, there's the -l option:

   -l [load], --load-average[=load]
        Specifies  that  no  new jobs (commands) should be started if there are others jobs running and the load average is at least load (a floating-
        point number).  With no argument, removes a previous load limit.

I don't think there's a standard option for this, though.