Run queries in parallel I am running a sql script on mysql 5.7.18 ubuntu server 16.04 that does a large number of updates in one table. Each one of the 50k updates takes under a second but the total run time is very long (>20m).

I can see from PROCESSLIST that only one thread is running and is processing the updates one-by-one.

How can I use multiple threads to speed the execution ?
Because you wrote "each one of the..." it sounds like you are updating individual rows. Rather than doing a row at a time, have you explored writing the SQL so you are letting the DB update many rows in one SQL statement? That will likely get you much better performance than trying to multi-thread manually.