Follow-up Comment #2, bug #30504 (project findutils):
Clearly -P would result in parallel processing if the input is sufficiently
large.
It's not going to be possible for xargs to choose an optimal strategy; at any
point it would need to be able to choose between reading another argument
(which may cause us to sleep, avoidably so if the input is a pipe) and execing
a child.
My preference has been to rely on the user to know both
1. the computational workload of each argument, on average
and
2. the amount of resources they want this job to use up ("use the whole
machine" is not always the preferred behaviour)
I'd like to see more debate on the list - in other words some kind of
consensus for how much of a problem people find this in general and what the
reasonable solutions are - before encouraging you to write a patch which may
not be accepted.
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