Warning: Starting 10 extra processes takes > 2 sec.

[Aaron Paetznick]

I keep getting the following warning when using parallel:

Warning: Starting 10 extra processes takes > 2 sec.
Limiting to 1 jobs in parallel.


This is on an NFS server that is busy compressing tar archives all day. 
 I appreciate that parallel is trying to protect me from myself, but I 
feel like I should be able to force the number of processes and/or 
bypass this warning if I need to.

This happens if I specify anything for -j, including -j2, -j8, and -j+0. 
 If I don't specify -j, it defaults to 9 processes and will correctly 
run all 9.  The irony here is that 9 processes will stress this machine 
too much, but if I specify say -j4 it will throw a warning and only 
start one process which will also kill the machine because it can't keep 
up with the incoming queue of files and then the disks get full.

I've tried messing with nice values and assigning parallel a better 
scheduler priority, but that's still not 100% effective and a little 
awkward.  Can I request a new feature to force the number of processes 
(i.e. --force) or at least bypass this check (i.e. 
--dont-blame-parallel)?  Or maybe parallel should only do this check if 
it's dynamically setting the number of processes (i.e. -j+0, -j50%, 
etc.) and not if explicitly passed a number (i.e. -j4, etc.).

Thanks.


--Aaron