# Jobs failing with parallelism (forks \> 1) on newer EE images

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/jobs-failing-with-parallelism-forks-1-on-newer-ee-images/46427>\
**Category:** Get Help\
**Tags:** fedora, awx, aws, ee\
**Created:** [October 6, 2026, 9:07pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/jobs-failing-with-parallelism-forks-1-on-newer-ee-images/46427 "2026-10-06T21:07:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![parkerfath](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/parkerfath/32/1578_2.png) [@parkerfath](https://forum.ansible.com/u/parkerfath)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2026, 9:07pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/jobs-failing-with-parallelism-forks-1-on-newer-ee-images/46427/1 "2026-10-06T21:07:50Z")

</div>

I have a working old Execution Environment based on the old `awx-ee:latest` base image, probably about 2+ years old. I was trying to update my Execution Environment, to pick up security and performance updates and bug fixes, and now I’m having trouble running jobs against many hosts with \> 1 fork.

Note that I’m using a bastion/jump SSH server between AWX and the target hosts.

On the prior setup, I was able to safely run with 8 forks (ideally I’d do 16 or 32, but those would fail). Now, using the fedora-42 base image or the ee-minimal-rhel9 base image, with 32 hosts and 8 forks, I get seemingly arbitrary unreachable/connect failures on about half of the hosts (16 of 32).

> Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Connection timed out during banner exchange

I haven’t changed the playbooks; just the EE. Has anyone else run into this, and do you have any guidance? I’m seeing mixed info about the recommended base image to use. I create custom EEs to support things like Google Cloud, AWS, HashiCorp, etc.

Thanks!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![parkerfath](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/parkerfath/32/1578_2.png) [@parkerfath](https://forum.ansible.com/u/parkerfath)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 10:08pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/jobs-failing-with-parallelism-forks-1-on-newer-ee-images/46427/2 "2026-10-08T22:08:25Z")

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Digging into my configs a little more, I realized that with the old base\_image, I had an ansible.cfg in place with pipelining=True, and the new build did not have the ansible.cfg

Once I added it back, parallel execution seems to work correctly.

Still seems a little odd that this seems to be _required_, but maybe my post will help someone else in the future:

ansible.cfg:

```auto
[defaults]
host_key_checking=False
interpreter_python=/usr/bin/python3
stdout_callback=debug
pipelining=True

timeout = 60
connect_timeout = 300
connect_retry_timeout = 200
command_timeout = 60

```

relevant sections of execution-environment.yml:

```yaml
additional_build_files:
    - src: files/ansible.cfg
      dest: configs

additional_build_steps:
  prepend_final:
    - COPY _build/configs/ansible.cfg /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

```