Running N jobs from M all the time

[Szabolcs Szakacsits <szaka@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm a new subscriber but using this lovely, powerful - well, as I
experienced far the best - shell for years. I can't live without it -
thank you for zsh!

My question would be there is an easy way for $SUBJECT? It would be
useful for SMP machines (e.g. running parallel exactly 4 graphic
processing utilities on a 4-way Xeon for/out of 1000 images) or when a
singlethreaded networking software can be split up into multiply parts
(e.g. mirroring, rsyncing different hosts) on a high-bandwidth host
thus a slow remote host or networking problem couldn't slow
down/stop the whole process. 

I know this can be done with ps, grep, wait, etc but a bit painful and
not elegant/modern I'd like to use a cleaner way. RTFM is welcomed but
I've read the docs and searched the zsh archivum for similar question
but couldn't find answer.

Thanks,

Szaka, who is disappointed because still none of the Linux
distribution makers select a well configured zsh as the default 
shell.