did you try make -j16 since you have 16 cores? -j with no number means spawn as many parallel jobs as possible which could be hundreds or thousands depending on

did you try make -j16 since you have 16 cores? -j with no number means spawn as many parallel jobs as possible which could be hundreds or thousands depending on the project, I learned this the hard way a while ago myself when I used $(nproc) incorrectly on a project, got the same OOM/swapping death spiral!