Our team is trying to use parallel step execution with the “group” key in our steps. We have something like 15 steps that can be run in parallel. The number of steps that actually run in parallel varies from build to build, and we can’t pin down why. We’ve got more than enough available drone agents. Any idea?
the group parameter in 0.8 runs steps in parallel on the same machine (same agent) so the number of agents does not matter in this case. I just wanted to clear up that there is no correlation between agents and step parallelization.
In terms of the behavior you have described, perhaps someone else can comment, since I have not observed this behavior. The underlying code does not place any restrictions on parallelism. It will fan-out an unlimited amount of steps [1]. The implementation has change significantly in 1.0 so you may want to try the latest 1.0 release candidate (rc.5).
[1] https://github.com/cncd/pipeline/blob/master/pipeline/pipeline.go#L84