diff --git a/make.sh b/make.sh
index 7e2aec257..16d6eddff 100755
--- a/make.sh
+++ b/make.sh
@@ -217,6 +217,12 @@ configure_build() {
 			parallelism=${cpu_max}
 		fi
 
+		# limit to -j23 because perl will not build
+		# more
+		if [ ${parallelism} -gt 23 ]; then
+			parallelism=23
+		fi
+
 		MAKETUNING="-j${parallelism}"
 	fi
 }