Python2.7 seemingly stuck on RPI3

A present attempt to compile www/chromium on a Pi3 using
a single make job has gotten stuck in a curious way: 

Python2.7 appears to be stuck, or nearly stuck, reading
swap. The machine isn't out of swap, in fact swap isn't
even very busy, around 85% for the hard disk partition 
and 15% for the microSD partition. Queue lengths are 
small and kBps close to 1000 for both. 


Here's a sample of disk activity:

procs     memory       page                      disks     faults       cpu
r b w     avm     fre  flt  re  pi  po    fr   sr mm0 da0   in   sy   cs us sy id
 0  0 13 2560404   57968  2546 103  83  35  2505 6020   0   0 20952   862  6525 19  4 78
dT: 10.009s  w: 10.000s
 L(q)  ops/s    r/s   kBps   ms/r    w/s   kBps   ms/w    d/s   kBps   ms/d   %busy Name
    0    147    147    944    0.9      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0   13.6  mmcsd0
    0    147    147    944    0.9      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0   13.8  mmcsd0s2
    1    144    141    878    6.6      2     76   31.8      0      0    0.0   85.9  da0
    0    147    147    944    0.9      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0   13.8  mmcsd0s2b
    1    143    141    878    6.6      2     76   31.8      0      0    0.0   86.0  da0s2
    0      2      0      0    0.0      2     76   31.8      0      0    0.0    0.6  da0s2a
    1    141    141    878    6.6      0      0    0.0      0      0    0.0   86.0  da0s2b
Sat Sep 11 12:01:49 PDT 2021
Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity
/dev/da0s2b       1843200   882800   960400    48%
/dev/mmcsd0s2b    1843200   880600   962600    48%
Total             3686400  1763400  1923000    48%

Here's a sample of top output


last pid: 41683;  load averages:  0.04,  0.13,  0.15                                                      up 15+17:47:00  12:02:29
48 processes:  1 running, 47 sleeping
CPU:  0.1% user,  0.0% nice,  0.7% system,  0.7% interrupt, 98.5% idle
Mem: 429M Active, 23M Inact, 182M Laundry, 222M Wired, 87M Buf, 44M Free
Swap: 3600M Total, 1711M Used, 1889M Free, 47% Inuse, 3784K In

  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    C   TIME    WCPU COMMAND
24726 root          1  20    0  1566M   627M swread   1   7:36   1.83% python2.7
 1074 bob           1  20    0    14M  1100K CPU0     0  39:03   0.14% top
  881 root          1  20    0    12M   268K select   0   6:49   0.02% powerd
 1069 bob           1  20    0    20M   684K select   0   3:28   0.02% sshd
  942 root          1  20    0    20M   644K select   3   3:18   0.00% sshd
24504 root          1  41    0   370M   356K select   2   1:17   0.00% ninja
  945 root          1  20    0    17M   972K select   2   1:04   0.00% sendmail
  827 root          1  20    0    13M   616K select   2   1:03   0.00% syslogd

Admittedly, 1700M of swap is a lot in use, but in the past the machine
was able to work through much higher swap usage. Now it seems well and
truly stuck, though still reasonably responisve to keyboard input.
It's unclear to me if this is my error or something else.

Thanks for reading, any thoughts appreciated.

bob prohaska