# Configuring the number of textual-ml workers

The `TEXTUAL_ML_WORKERS` environment variable specifies the number of workers to use within the `textual-ml` container. The default value is 1.

Having multiple workers allows for parallelization of inferences with NER models. The number of required workers is also affected by the [number of jobs that each worker can run simultaneously](https://docs.tonic.ai/textual/textual-install-administer/configuring-textual/general-instance-and-processing-settings/config-processing-parallelism).

When you deploy Textual with Kubernetes on GPUs, parallelization allows the `textual-ml` container to fully utilize the GPU.

We recommend 3GB of GPU RAM for each worker.&#x20;