I would agree that turning down parallelism should help with the worker starvation.
One other thing about VM boxes that I recently ran into is that you will want to talk to the VM Administrator and make sure your drives are RAW. If they're not RAW, VM gets involved in every read and write to the drives, also slowing things down.
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
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