diff --git a/build.gradle b/build.gradle
index c42a889e79e..1a93e85c056 100644
--- a/build.gradle
+++ b/build.gradle
@@ -105,7 +105,6 @@ subprojects {
     [compileJava, compileTestJava]*.options*.compilerArgs = ["-Xlint:none", "-nowarn"]
 
     test {
-        maxParallelForks = 1
         // when failFast = true AND retry is on, there is a serious issue:
         // gradle might stop the test run due to the failFast but still concludes with BUILD SUCCESSFUL (if the retry is successful)
         failFast = false
diff --git a/docs/testing.md b/docs/testing.md
index f1445d89bf2..763433118d5 100644
--- a/docs/testing.md
+++ b/docs/testing.md
@@ -133,4 +133,52 @@ If you have timing-based issues in your test, ensure that you set `$TZ` before s
 
     $ TZ="Europe/Paris" docker compose up
 
-It is not required, and MySQL will default to using UTC.
\ No newline at end of file
+It is not required, and MySQL will default to using UTC.
+
+## Running tests in parallel
+
+Depending on the machine used for tests, HSQL-based tests are twice as fast as Postgres or MySQL tests. The bottleneck
+project is `cloudfoundry-identity-uaa`. Tests for other projects are much faster, and since each project is tested in
+parallel, they all complete before the longer `cloudfoundry-identity-uaa` test is over.
+
+While it makes sense to run tests in parallel for `cloudfoundry-identity-uaa` when testing locally, it has a few
+consequences. First, it might bring it test pollution, see [above](#test-pollution). Second, the databases must be able
+to handle the incoming connections, but this is handled by setting the number of concurrent connections to 250 on both
+Postgres and MySQL.
+
+Furthermore, too many tests running in parallel has diminishing returns, because the Spring testing support caches
+ApplicationContext between tests to avoid bootstrapping too many contexts. Having many tests in parallel means there
+will be a lot of cache misses, and every gradle worker handling a test will have to bootstrap multiple
+ApplicationContext, which is usually quite slow. A value that has been previously used is 6 workers in parallel, and,
+for any given project, 4 tests in parallel. Since `cloudfoundry-identity-uaa` is the bottleneck, we make its tests run
+in parallel, and keep other projects running sequential tests. Empirically, this yields a x2 or more speedup on the test
+suite on a powerful developer machine. Increasing parallelism further yields no benefits (for example, tests are
+slightly slower on a Mac M1 using 6 tests in parallel).
+
+Technically, parallelism is controlled by two parameters:
+
+- `org.gradle.workers.max` in `gradle.properties`, set to 6. This means that there are no more than 6 gradle processes
+  running at any given time. It does not have anything to do with tests directly. This might mean you have a 3 compile
+  processes for 3 different projects, as well as 3 test processes for different projects. Within a given project, by
+  default, tests are running sequentially and never in parallel. Unless you configure parallelism for tests, see below:
+- `maxParallelForks` in the test task in the project's `build.gradle`, set to 4. This controls how many tests can run in
+  parallel within a given project. It is bounded by the max workers set above - so if there are 5 compile tasks running,
+  and one test task, the test task will run tests sequentially as there is a single worker available left.
+
+With this setup, we get 11 test workers total, 4 for `cloudfoundry-identity-uaa`, plus 1 per remaining project:
+
+- `cloudfoundry-identity-metrics-data`
+- `cloudfoundry-identity-statsd-lib`
+- `cloudfoundry-identity-model`
+- `cloudfoundry-identity-statsd`
+- `cloudfoundry-identity-samples:cloudfoundry-identity-api`
+- `cloudfoundry-identity-samples:cloudfoundry-identity-app`
+- `cloudfoundry-identity-server`
+
+Since `cloudfoundry-identity-uaa` depends on all the projects, it runs last, and gets workers 8, 9, 10 and 11. If some
+tests did not need to be re-run because the code hasn't changed in some projects, it may get assigned workers with lower
+IDs. This means that we need all databases between `uaa_1` and `uaa_11`, included. To make sure we have enough room for
+future changes, we will keep the current setup with 24 databases, see [test pollution](#test-pollution).
+
+In single-CPU scenarios (i.e. in CI), we would only need two databases, `uaa_7` for`cloudfoundry-identity-server` and
+`uaa_8` for `cloudfoundry-identity-uaa`.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/gradle.properties b/gradle.properties
index ce4c5213511..e8f382a981e 100644
--- a/gradle.properties
+++ b/gradle.properties
@@ -12,3 +12,4 @@ ossrhUsername=
 ossrhPassword=
 group=org.cloudfoundry.identity
 archivesBaseName="uaa"
+org.gradle.workers.max=6
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/scripts/docker-compose.yml b/scripts/docker-compose.yml
index 067f338be39..77a26251f9a 100644
--- a/scripts/docker-compose.yml
+++ b/scripts/docker-compose.yml
@@ -13,6 +13,10 @@ services:
           size: 1073741824 # 1024 * 2^20 bytes = 1024Mb
     environment:
       - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=changeme
+    command:
+      - postgres
+      - -c
+      - max_connections=250
   mysql:
     image: "mysql:8"
     ports:
diff --git a/scripts/mysql/init-db.sh b/scripts/mysql/init-db.sh
index 274a419e64a..2b4fbbd0835 100755
--- a/scripts/mysql/init-db.sh
+++ b/scripts/mysql/init-db.sh
@@ -2,8 +2,7 @@
 
 set -euo pipefail
 
-# Number of gradle workers times 4, which was somewhat arbitrary but is sufficient in practice.
-# We make extra dbs because a gradle worker ID can exceed the max number of workers.
+# See docs/testing.md, sections on "test pollution" and "parallelism"
 NUM_OF_DATABASES_TO_CREATE=24
 
 function initDB() {
diff --git a/scripts/postgresql/init-db.sh b/scripts/postgresql/init-db.sh
index 2f65fcb7beb..bb14f785f8f 100755
--- a/scripts/postgresql/init-db.sh
+++ b/scripts/postgresql/init-db.sh
@@ -2,8 +2,7 @@
 
 set -euo pipefail
 
-# Number of gradle workers times 4, which was somewhat arbitrary but is sufficient in practice.
-# We make extra dbs because a gradle worker ID can exceed the max number of workers.
+# See docs/testing.md, sections on "test pollution" and "parallelism"
 NUM_OF_DATABASES_TO_CREATE=24
 
 function initDB() {
diff --git a/scripts/start_db_helper.sh b/scripts/start_db_helper.sh
index 64d36437dbf..6e23284f440 100755
--- a/scripts/start_db_helper.sh
+++ b/scripts/start_db_helper.sh
@@ -3,8 +3,7 @@
 set -eu
 script_dir="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
 
-# Number of gradle workers times 4, which was somewhat arbitrary but is sufficient in practice.
-# We make extra dbs because a gradle worker ID can exceed the max number of workers.
+# See docs/testing.md, sections on "test pollution" and "parallelism"
 NUM_OF_DATABASES_TO_CREATE=24
 
 function createDB() {
diff --git a/server/src/main/java/org/cloudfoundry/identity/uaa/db/UaaDatabaseName.java b/server/src/main/java/org/cloudfoundry/identity/uaa/db/UaaDatabaseName.java
index 105fa5f140e..6a9f749ace0 100644
--- a/server/src/main/java/org/cloudfoundry/identity/uaa/db/UaaDatabaseName.java
+++ b/server/src/main/java/org/cloudfoundry/identity/uaa/db/UaaDatabaseName.java
@@ -16,4 +16,4 @@ public String getName() {
 
         return UAA_DB_NAME + "_" + gradleWorkerId;
     }
-}
+}
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/uaa/build.gradle b/uaa/build.gradle
index 0cf7ebe7b49..2d1742cb897 100644
--- a/uaa/build.gradle
+++ b/uaa/build.gradle
@@ -109,6 +109,19 @@ test {
     exclude("**/*IT.class")
     exclude("**/*Docs.class")
     systemProperty("mock.suite.test", "true")
+
+    // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+    // Running tests in parallel
+    // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+    // Count available cores. We assume 2 logical cores per physical core.
+    // In case there is only one vCPU, we count 1 full core.
+    var availableCpus = Math.max(Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors() / 2, 1.0)
+
+    // We want some amount of parallelism, but it does not make sense to run too many
+    // tests in parallel, see docs/testing. We target 4 tests in parallel at most. If
+    // there are less CPUs available, we use all available CPUs but no more.
+    maxParallelForks = Math.min(availableCpus, 4)
 }
 
 task populateVersionfile {