I do not know exactly how to describe my issue so im having a problem researching it. I am using icedtea-7.2.5.4 to compile icedtea-6.1.13.6 on my test laptop. My laptop is relatively old with an single core sempron si-42 2.1 GHz with about 2gb of free ram not used by background processes so compiling takes awhile however randomly without producing an error or warning portage seems to completely stop. Checking top & htop I find every process involved using 0% cpu and stays that way for hours until i send a sigkill. Since I am the one terminating it there is no error log and the build.log seems clean as well. Has anyone run into this sort of problem before?

Ok i figured out the problem I had. I had a misconfiguration in my fstab and my swap partition did not mount so as emerge compiled a large package like icedtea or libreoffice it used up all available system memory.