problem with -S with -a?

[Max Birkoff]

Hello,

First and foremost, thank you so much for gnu parallel! it's allowed me to get 
a lot done. Thank you!

I've been trying to use parallel in this way (on host1.here.com):
  parallel -a /home/max/commands -j 4 -S 4/host2.here.com

and I expect the set of commands to execute on both host1.here.com and 
host2.here.com. While they do, I observe two things that I did not expect:
  (1) -j does not appear to be respected on host2 (hence the 4/)
  (2) the commands from the commands file are executed on both host1 and host2.

For (2), say the commads file contains the eight commands:
  echo a
  echo b
  echo c
  echo d
  echo e
  echo f
  echo g
  echo h

I expected about half of the commands to be executed on host1 and the 
complimentary set to be executed on host2. Instead I find that some commands 
are executed on both hosts. Is this expected?

To workaround this issue, my plan is to split the commands file and invoke 
parallel on both hosts, but I wondered if anyone else has seen this behavior.

Thanks much in advance,

max