Limit the amount of concurrent child processes

[shawninder]

If I launch too many child processes at the same time, everything breaks down and the computer becomes unresponsive. This is something that should be handle by the OS (in my honest opinion), but apparently isn't, so I guess I'll have to do this myself.

Perhaps there is a way to use system introspection to know when to delay the launch of a new child process. Perhaps it's easier to simply enforce a hard limit (as a function of the number of cores, for example).