“Going though some log files the other day I came to a realization. Most modern machine are muti-processor machines and they are rarely used as such. I had a boat-load of log files that had been archived I had to go though. It was taking forever to un-compress each one by one. At first I thought I would just make a loop, send all the gunzip processes to the background and wait for them to be done…”
http://blog.labrat.info/20100429/using-xargs-to-do-parallel-processing/
thoughts... 