[icebraining]

And with GNU parallel, which can take the place of xargs, you can even distribute that job across multiple machines easily (as long as they're accessible by SSH).

[reacharavindh]

Yes, I need to look into whether and how Gnu Parallel will queue up tasks if I restricted the number of parallel processes.

In my case, I was dealing with a FreeBSD server. I went the xargs route instead of installing something that is not available by default.