SPARC assembler takes a LONG time

[pisces!vanroy at ucbvax.berkeley.edu]

Assembling a SPARC assembly file that is 8 Meg long takes several hours
of clock time (around 40 minutes of CPU time) and needs 72 Meg of virtual
space (of which only 3-6 Meg are resident at any time).  The assembly runs
fast at first (using >80 % of cpu cycles), but slows to a trickle ( <10% of
cpu cycles) after about 20 cpu minutes, on an otherwise unloaded machine.
Is it thrashing?  How in the name of ?$%&! can an assembler thrash?  This is
running under cc on a SPARCstation 1+ with 40 Meg internal memory and 150 Meg
swap space.

Can anyone explain this behavior?  The assembly file uses a large number
of local labels (about 56 thousand), but is otherwise rather vanilla.

Thanks for any pointers,
	Peter Van Roy
	vanroy at ucbarpa.berkeley.edu