processing modular docbook

Hi,
I have a document that when printed is about 8000 pages. Because of the time it takes to process, I'd like to be able to process each chapter separately, but the more I read, the more I doubt the possibility.

My guess is that if I decide to try it, I'll have to set the numbering for chapters/tables/examples/figures in each chapter and set up a granular olink database to handle the cross-refs. And  create the book-level toc, index, any HTMLHelp files by some other means.

I haven't yet tried processing this particular document, but a 3,000 page doc takes about 2 hours on  my FreeBSD machine. The processing uses only one of its cpus of course, and neither memory or diskspace is a limitation--the processing seems to be cpu-bound only.

Any advice ?

thanks,
--Tim Arnold