Possible to parallellize SonarQube background tasks?

Question

In SonarQube (5.6.4 LTS) there is a view where background (project analysis) tasks are visualized: (Administration / Projects / Background Tasks). It seems like the tasks are run in sequence (one at a time). Some tasks could take 40 minutes which means other projects are queued up waiting for this task to finish before they could be started.

Is it possible to configure the SonarQube Compute Engine so that these tasks are run in parallel instead?

Answer 1

As per documentation on Background Tasks:

You can control the number of Analysis Reports that can be processed at a time in $SQ_HOME/conf/sonar.properties (see sonar.ce.workerCount - Default is 1).

Careful though: blindly increasing sonar.ce.workerCount without proper monitoring is just like shooting in the dark. The underlying resources available (CPU/RAM) are fixed (all workers run in the Compute Engine JVM), and you don't want to end-up with very limited memory for each task and/or high CPU-switching. That would kill performance for each of the tasks, rather than having only a few in parallel which will be much more efficient.

In short: better to have maximum 2 tasks in parallel that can complete under a minute (i.e. max 10 minutes to run 20 tasks), rather than 20 sluggish tasks in parallel that will overall take 15 minutes to complete because they struggle to share common CPU/RAM.

Update: with SonarQube 6.7+ and the new licence plans, "parallel processing of reports" has become a commercial feature and is only available in the Enterprise Edition.