diff --git a/mercurial/dirstate.py b/mercurial/dirstate.py
--- a/mercurial/dirstate.py
+++ b/mercurial/dirstate.py
@@ -1116,6 +1116,17 @@
             use_rust = False
 
         if use_rust:
+            # Force Rayon (Rust parallelism library) to respect the number of
+            # workers. This is a temporary workaround until Rust code knows
+            # how to read the config file.
+            numcpus = self._ui.configint("worker", "numcpus")
+            if numcpus is not None:
+                os.environ.setdefault('RAYON_NUM_THREADS', str(numcpus))
+
+            workers_enabled = self._ui.configbool("worker", "enabled", True)
+            if not workers_enabled:
+                os.environ["RAYON_NUM_THREADS"] = "1"
+
             (
                 lookup,
                 modified,