--min-parallelism sets max parallelism too

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

All this talk about parallelism made me look deeper into how its works.
And I found something a little surprising. Due to a quirk in how options
are processed, when you specify --min-parallelism without also
specifying --max-parallelism, the maximum parallelism is also set to the
minimum. In other words, the parallelism stays the same for the whole
scan, never dropping below the minimum but never rising above it either.

The relevant code is in NmapOps.cc:

        max_parallelism = 0;

        ...

        /* Prevent performance values from getting out of whack */
        if (min_parallelism > max_parallelism)
                max_parallelism = min_parallelism;

This assignment should only take place if max_parallelism has been
defined, I think. Or is this the intended behavior?

David Fifield

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