This fixes a fork bomb in `spack versions`. Recursive generation of pools
to scrape URLs in `_spider` was creating large numbers of processes.
Instead of recursively creating process pools, we now use a single
`ThreadPool` with a concurrency limit.
More on the issue: having ~10 users running at the same time spack
versions on front-end nodes caused kernel lockup due to the high number
of sockets opened (sys-admin reports ~210k distributed over 3 nodes).
Users were internal, so they had ulimit -n set to ~70k.
The forking behavior could be observed by just running:
$ spack versions boost
and checking the number of processes spawned. Number of processes
per se was not the issue, but each one of them opens a socket
which can stress `iptables`.
In the original issue the kernel watchdog was reporting:
Message from syslogd@login03 at May 19 12:01:30 ...
kernel:Watchdog CPU:110 Hard LOCKUP
Message from syslogd@login03 at May 19 12:01:31 ...
kernel:watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#110 stuck for 23s! [python3:2756]
Message from syslogd@login03 at May 19 12:01:31 ...
kernel:watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#94 stuck for 22s! [iptables:5603]
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