Re: --min-parallelism sets max parallelism too

["Kris Katterjohn" <katterjohn () gmail com>]

On 9/2/07, David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com> wrote:
> 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
Well, there is also this line above that:

  if (max_parallelism && min_parallelism && (min_parallelism >
max_parallelism)) {
    fatal("--min-parallelism=%i must be less than or equal to
--max-parallelism=%i",min_parallelism,max_parallelism);


So if they are both set, and min > max, then it bails.

But otherwise, max = min because you need to have max >= min and (I guess)
you can't really gauge how much the user wants for a max.

That's what I get from it, but I usually just stick with the timing
templates for changes :)

Thanks,
Kris Katterjohn

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