[nullc]

parallel is great but its default behaviors never quite seem to match my needs, so every time I use it I have to spend some time consulting the man page. Fortunately, the man page is more than up to the task.

But because of the mini learning curve on each use and because I find I need a little more boiler plate to use parallel, I use xargs -P more often, only using parallel when I need its special features (e.g. multiple hosts or collating the output streams).

Oh also, parallel itself can be a bit of a resource hog. (Obviously that depends a lot on how you're using it-- but I mean in cases where xargs' usage is unnoticeable I sometimes have to change the size of my jobs to get parallel out of the way).