View Creation Failure

[Alan Mock]

I have a database with about 170000 documents and I'm trying to create a view 
on.  When I do so either by using curl or from CouchDB's web interface it 
fails with either

{os_process_error,{exit_status,137}}

or 

{timeout_value,[{couch_os_process,readline,2},
                   {couch_os_process,readjson,1},
                   {couch_os_process,handle_call,3},
                   {gen_server,handle_msg,5},
                   {proc_lib,init_p_do_apply,3}]}

If I try to access the view again it starts over, so the view index creation 
never finishes.  Is there some way to force the creation of the view index?

Thanks,
Alan