More workers = Slower?

[Joe Stump]

So I'm seeing bizarre results with Gearman. I've got two gearmand's  
running and 20 workers running. I run 20 SQL queries in parallel via  
Gearman and it takes an average of 60-65ms to run those queries. I  
then drop the number of workers down to 5 workers and the same script  
takes about 45ms to run. If I up the number of workers to 100 things  
get even worse with the average time jumping to 195ms.

Anyone seen similar issues? How many workers should I be running per  
instance of gearmand? It seems ludicrous to me that I can only run 5  
workers per gearmand server ...

--Joe