Purpose of lock in addprocs

Hello

I’d like to understand the purpose of the lock in addprocs.

I ask because the slurm scheduler seems to disadvantage 1 request for n nodes vs n requests for 1 node. I am guessing the lock stops me from making multiple requests in parallel to slurm via addprocs (or at least, something is and this looks like the culprit).

If I take the lock out, will Bad Things happen?