Amen for schedtool
How did I not know about this sooner?
Trying to build a particularly large maven project would consume so much CPU that my poor laptop would quit because it was sweating too much.
I used schedtool to set an affinity to only one of the two CPUs available on my dual-core laptop for the shell I used to launch the build, and voila! Things don't get as hot, and my system stays responsive. *phew!*