I upped the max number of open files using ulimit from 256 to 10000 and ran my massive build again. While the build was running I monitored the files opened by tclsh8.5 using sudo lsof | grep -i tcl | grep receipts | wc -l There were 272 instances of /opt/local/var/macports/receipts/file_map.db open. I think we have a file open leak.