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Feature: Configuration to set maximum parallelization of :parallel runner

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
ruby
Domain
devops

Research direction

Start by reading the SSHKit implementations of the :parallel and :groups runners and how default_runner_config is applied. Compare the proposed limit and threads configurations, then verify that a bounded default runner works for deployment operations without requiring SCM-specific rate limiting.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

discuss! new feature

There have been multiple requests to set an upper limit on the number of git operations that are executed in parallel in the default Capistrano git strategy. Similarly, users are also asking for a limit on the number of parallel bundle install executions in capistrano-bundler.

What these tasks have in common is that they all use the default :parallel runner provided by SSHKit. When using Capistrano to deploy to a large number of servers, firing off these operations to all servers in parallel can overload shared resources like a git server or private gem repository.

Rather than implement rate limiting for each SCM, capistrano-bundler, etc., I feel like a more general solution should be provided by SSHKit itself.

My proposal would be to change the implementation of the :parallel runner to essentially be a subclass of the :groups runner, except with defaults of wait: 0 and limit: INFINITY. Then, if a user wants to limit the amount of parallelization, they could simply do this:

# Limit the default :parallel runner to 10 threads
SSHKit.config.default_runner_config = { limit: 10 }

If sharing implementation and configuration keys between :parallel and :groups is too confusing, then perhaps the :parallel runner could use a different configuration key (but to the same effect):

# Limit the default :parallel runner to 10 threads
SSHKit.config.default_runner_config = { threads: 10 }

Thoughts?

See also:

Dominant language
Ruby
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Forks
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