Attempted compile of php4b3 comes dangerously close to crashing the system.

Config: (doesn't matter, I've tried three variations on it, the least of which was)

/configure --prefix=/www --with-apache=../apache_1.3.9 --with-mysql --enable-track-vars=yes

This config results in the following:
9:07am  up 96 days,  6:58,  2 users,  load average: 13.24, 12.21, 6.04
67 processes: 61 sleeping, 4 running, 1 zombie, 1 stopped
CPU states:  0.1% user,  0.1% system,  0.2% nice,  0.3% idle
Mem:   63008K av,  61552K used,   1456K free,   9488K shrd,   1308K buff
Swap:  65672K av,  42900K used,  22772K free                  7788K cached

PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
5277 root       3   0 71876  43M  1988 R       0 13.4 70.5   2:42 cc1

At this point the system was almost unusable. The drives were thrashing themselves into jelly and X was completely hosed. I had to telnet into the box from another machine to facilitate recovery. All of this occured while trying to compile the very first file:

make
make  all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/local/src/php-4.0b3'
Making all in libzend
make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/local/src/php-4.0b3/libzend'
/bin/sh ./libtool --silent --mode=compile gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I/usr/local/src/php-4.0b3/./libzend -I.     -g -O2 -g -c -o zend_execute.lo zend_execute.c

That's as far as it got. Whatever it is in there makes it totally impossible for me to compile php4b3. I've not had any problem even remotely similar to this on any previous version of PHP. I've tried this three times now with the same result each time regardless of config options chosen. This last attempt was after a wipe of the src directory tree and reinstalling the source files from the tarball. 

Fun fun fun...