fork (for job adhoc command) start with high value (512) and finish with default value of 5 about awx HOT 2 OPEN

@sivel do you have some insight on the expected behavior when forks is set to 512? should it eventually taper off to 5 processes as number of hosts left dwindle?

from awx.

512 forks is an almost obscene amount of forks. 25, 50...maybe 100 if you have a really modern CPU and like 256GB of RAM. I'd have to assume that at 512 forks, the load average on the machine is probably through the roof.

The architecture in ansible-core currently uses a single core to orchestrate and manage all forks. Not only is it tracking the life cycle of a fork, and launching forks, it is also processing and displaying a lot of data. Launching forks also requires a lot of variable calculations. It's not truly asynchronous, so it's also generally impossible to see exactly the amount of forks as you have configured. The more forks you specify, the more CPU bound the orchestration becomes, and the less able new forks are able to be created to stay at the configured fork count.

Also note, as indicated above, that forks are spawned per host per task. They aren't persistent, so there is a new fork spawned for each host+task combination.

But in short, toward the end of an execution, you should see less forks as the previous hosts have finished executing, ultimately dropping to 0. There is nothing that will drop it to the default fork level, it could just be happenstance that you are seeing that.

from awx.