[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 1"""
 date="2015-10-02T16:14:20Z"
 content="""
Well, I can confirm that only one instance of any 
external special remote will be run per git-annex process currently. 

Actually, it's a bit more than that -- If multiple threads try to use the
same external special remote at the same time, everything is necessarily
serialized, and so using -J won't let multiple downloads happen at once
from a single external special remote, although it may still usefuly
parallelize amoung several remotes.

Since that seems like something worth dealing with, perhaps by having a
pool of external special remote processes, I don't feel comfortable making
any promises about the behavior. And as you note, it's easy to get multiple
procesess by running multiple git-annex commands, so that is something an
external special remote needs to deal with anyway.
"""]]
